I just realized that lemmy doesn’t have karma like reddit. I’ve never paid much attention to karma. But even so it does seem to play an important role in moderation on reddit.
For instance, many subs put a karma restriction on who can post which helps decrease trolls.
And while it’s true that karma gives an incentive for people to seek karma I think it’s overall regulatory principle might be worth considering as a trade off.
Universal karma wouldnt work for gate keeping or weighting in a federation anyway. Since the internal activity of each server is opaque to the others, theres no practical way to verify that karma reported by a different server is genuine and not internal bot activity or just manually edited by the server owner.