Accounts and account histories are abstractions of personalities. Karma gets applied to accounts. The score of a thread is the delta of the karma of the account

Accounts and account histories are abstractions of personalities. Karma gets applied to accounts. The score of a thread is the delta of the karma of the accounts that participated in that thread. Names are greyed out like everything else besides comment text to be minimally distracting. If pg wanted post content to be entirely divorced from the person writing it he could have designed the forum that way, but all of these features are designed as operant conditioning for the person behind the name.