Too many people are confusing the two. Whenever lemmy.ml or its devs do something stupid, people go “Lemmy is getting worse and worse,” or “I’m leaving Lemmy,” or worse, “I’m leaving for Beehaw.”
If you’re using Beehaw, then you’re using Lemmy. Lemmy is the software these instances run on. If you don’t like lemmy.ml, join another instances that have rules that match your philosophy. Some instance hosts authoritarian or fascist shit? Turn to another Lemmy instance. Lemmy.ml is not even the biggest instance. People who just joined and are unfamiliar with the platform will just think the entire Lemmyverse is run by autocratic admins if we don’t get our terminology right.
Karma is important? The only “use” for it is to do what? users farm it so adding karma or something similar would just make this place worse
Now, that said, there are ways to game those things too, but that’s the concept and some of the bigger benefits.
I still receive PMs every once in a while from random people on Reddit thanking me for comments that I’ve posted years ago. Those comments have less than 20 karma combined. I also have a comment saying “Nice.” which contributes nothing and is sitting at almost 3000. Karma is meaningless.
Nice.
I’m not a karma whore, otherwise I would not post on Lemmy. But when you post something and you see that people agree with it is nice to see. I do not see the problem with karma.