The secret is that Lemmy is tracking karma, it just doesn't show it. There are fields in the database that hold the total comment score and total post score.
Yeah I recognize it's a decision from the admins here, but it's one I approve of heavily for reasons said when I posted this to the fediverse channel. The motivation behind posting is less tainted this way.
Nah I don't think there is an option to show it in Lemmy. It just seems it's there in the database either in anticipation of adding the feature, or because because of changed plans.
All the calculations are being done already, so it wouldn't be saving and server time. I think it's just something they might have done because if you decide to do it later I bet it gets a lot more difficult to retroactively calculate it.
It doesn't seem to be accurate. It shows 20 comment karma and 1 post karma for me in wefwef, but even scrolling back thorough the comments shows way more. The database shows hundreds of each for me.
I don't know how wefwef calculates karma but it must be guessing.
I noticed when I had made 4 comments, it correctly displayed the total of all my scores, which I think was like 12 at the time, but now that I’ve made a few more, that add up to like 20 something it says my total is 8.