There’s some misinformation floating around regarding Lemmy not having a karma system. While many have discovered otherwise, this is for those who may not have.
While it’s not exposed in the Lemmy default user interface, Lemmy does have a fully functional karma system and it is visible in third party clients such as WefWef and Memmy.
Do with that what you will.
Agreed. As others have pointed out, voting helps to elevate higher quality posts (even if it doesn’t always work that way), but karma takes that imperfect process to its ridiculous extreme.