Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Exactly! A lot of games just got killed, and now we're heari

Repeat after me: you cannot have a system with points and expect people not to play games with it. Exactly! A lot of games just got killed, and now we're hearing some protesting about it. The entire point of using karma is that it means something -- it has value. Heck, I bet to some folks it has a lot of value. I'd further bet that it has so much value to some folks that you could monetize it. But that's a discussion for another day. You don't find it slightly pathetic that people would be judging themselves by the score of their comments on a web site? And I say this as an upstanding member of the Karma Kommunity. There is, actually, one system of points that works brilliantly. Metafilter's favoriting system, which allows upvotes but not downvotes, lets top comments get notified, but doesn't penalize any other comments, and because MF uses a flat commenting system the conversation isn't at all affected by what people like and dislike.