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’d check sometimes whether someone had a history and how long their account had been around, but 18,000 vs 80,000 or 800,000 is super meaningless to me. Personally I’d delete my accounts every 1-6 months. It was a pain to start over but after that, so what. Reddit is practically anonymous. Posts and comments stand on their own to me… it’s not about the reputation of the author.