It wasn’t important on Reddit. Even there you could only lose 15 points on any downvoted comment and you couldn’t lose points for posts. Karma was just a way to measure how frequently you interacted in an additive way. It’s only real utility was for mods to bar new accounts from posting without getting come karma from other places first. and Lemmy definitely needs something like that in the near future for moderation, but they have to fix the bug with the total first.