Stuff like that mostly just makes people weirdly competitive. I’d rather have a community of people posting because they like to do it, not to just make a meaningless number go up

No. Lemmy removed that feature because it leads to gamification that is unhealthy for the community.

Can’t have karma farming bots without karma.

I didn’t even notice. However now that I’m aware, I like that it’s not shown. Displaying a total score just incentivises karma farming.

The value isn’t as important and is more misleading.

You can create your own instance and give yourself as much karma as you want.

There are no internal Lemmy structures to prevent mass upvoting or downvoting.

Culture and voting rules across Lemmy are different and without a centralized authority.

Since the number is useless, it is made unavailable.

I like it without a total count. I’m not worried if something I say gets heavily down voted (and usually it deserves it if it does happen). Plus you don’t get try hards who only care about making that number go up, and are just posting everywhere in pursuit of that goal rather than cause they thought it was worth posting.

We do have comment and post karma. It’s better with just those and not a running total.