RIght now lemmy doesn't calculate or display a user's "karma". And many think this a good thing (me included).
Interestingly, kbin does calculate karma, even for us lemmy users (you can all probably just search on kbin.social and find your karma now, +/- federation inconsistencies).
Whenever karma comes up, this fact often comes up, along with the identification of up/down voters, such that many lemmy users will probably know that they actually do have karma and can go look it up if they want to. Some lemmy apps/frontends are also reporting karma AFAIU.
So I think the question now presents itself of whether this is an issue we want users to have some control over, within the bounds of what can done over federation/AP of course.
I can imagine a system where karma is an opt-in setting of one's profile, and a protocol is established that any platform/client that understands up/down votes ought to respect this setting and that non-compliance risks defederation.
Though lemmy/kbin obviously lean more "public internet resource" than microblogging platforms like mastodon, I think it makes sense to value user health and safety here, and this seems like a not unreasonable option to establish a norm around.
Thoughts?
I think having publicly-viewable 'karma' is a mistake - there's no benefit to having karma-whore posts and bots if it doesn't gain you anything, and that's a cancer that eats away at other platforms. Similarly, the effect of brigading a single comment is much less - encourages conversation rather than groupthink. And we can all see each other's posting history anyway - we can see whether any given account is a troll account and admins can ban them.