While that might work on a small scale, I think at larger scales it starts to just turn into excessive noise. It also becomes hard to distinguish between "margi

While that might work on a small scale, I think at larger scales it starts to just turn into excessive noise. It also becomes hard to distinguish between "marginally interesting" and "karma whoring". I think long term its much better to encourage the behaviors you want. Besides, you can always lower the threshold for "interesting". The point is to encourage the creation of good content and ignore (as far as rewards go) the creation of bad content. The h-index stuff is interesting, though, and I'll definitely be looking in to it some more.