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.
I thought the best/top/hot were governed by upvotes/downvotes on that specific post. Not the user’s Karma.
Correct. There is no karma factor. There is a time factor that causes a post’s/comment’s rank to decay. The devs have documented their algorithm.