Why is karma tracked at all? I know that it's used to unlock features of the site, but that doesn't need to be visible. The point of voting is for ranking comments and stories (which is great!), but it seems to have negative effects when public.
I disagree. I put a lot of effort into finding good stories and posting more useful comments when the /leaders page was a big deal, solely because I wanted to reach the top half of the page.
Not everyone is motivated by point scoring but some people are, and that's not always a bad or selfish thing.
