I really think despite that we don't have overall karma, people still get off on getting highly rated posts. I mostly lurked on Reddit, but would occasionally post something and I can't deny that I enjoyed seeing the post get a lot of upvotes. But here on Lemmy, I became a mod of a couple communities and I post a lot and I've noticed I don't even pay attention to the scores at all. I think one reason is since I post a lot more, I don't pay attention, and also the scores don't generally get as high, due to the smaller userbase. But I agree, people need to get out of that mentality of trying to get the highest rated post scores. It really makes it much more enjoyable to get involved in discussions, IMO.