Also, not having a total karma count kinda makes up/down vote ratio on any individual comment or post irrelevant

This depends on your client. A lot of them hide responses in the same way Reddit did.

That's because -5 was the default threshold for a comment being automatically hidden on reddit. Most people never bothered to change the setting.

I can't even see downvotes on here and I quite like it. If someone can't be bothered to actually tell me why I'm wrong I don't care much about their opinion anyway.