There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated

There are some things it makes sense for; flagging submissions, downvotes, and perhaps a few other things being karma-restricted removes some issues associated with people trolling. It's also useful for identifying comments which lots of people find useful - or ones which are useless. It's basically a community-powered spamfilter and measure of relevance. That said, I would be entirely in favor of hiding or obscuring karma, outside of comment sorting (and even that could be obscured while still being useful). Of course, hiding/obscuring karma could remove some of the motivation to upvote comments. It would be interesting to see how usage patterns changed if it was hidden/obscured ... An option to hide karma would be useful as well, for people who aren't interested (like you). I wonder if there's an extension for some browser which does that; if not, it probably wouldn't be too hard to write one [stripping out everything in the form of "# points" and the (#) next to the username in the bar at the top of a page ... adding display:none to all the score_# classes and applying a bit of filtering to pagetop would do that.] I'm also in favor of getting rid of downvotes, mostly because I see them abused too much (people being downvoted for expressing unpopular opinions, especially anti-apple), but that's neither here nor there.