Yea, comments aren't an issue, but my recent threads aren't going through, it seems. Which is weird, because I know I've posted weeks before and it was fine.
I never really did anything with the motive of gaining internet points and it still feels surreal that enough people did for this to be a common complaint about Reddit and a "how do we prevent it" discussion topic on kbin.
I know right? I don't really care for them as a user, points are useful for posts and comments, as I said.
I liked the idea of having them up to a certain point, like 1k or 5k as mentioned. They'd be useful for the scenario as you mentioned.
Firstly, I'd say don't let perfect be the enemy of good; there may not be a perfect system, but Reddit back when I used it was pretty good 80% of the time, until you got to the big memey subs. There's an additional bonus here, in that activity can be seen. At first I was a little apprehensive but now I think I'm on board with it, so sock puppets can be tracked.
I don't think individual karma ratings should be used to weigh up votes across the board, because simply put, a user shouldn't have a bigger influence just because they got more Internet points.
I think the basic premise of all this up voting and down voting should be that it's a form of crowd sourced moderating. Users letting other users know what was interesting and what was detrimental to the conversation. I've seen proposals like giving votes more context (eg a funny vote, like Steam reviews and Ars Technica's forums), so that might help shape the quality of the crowdsourced opinions.
I agree, Internet points are just useless. The points should be useful in seeing the popularity of a given post or comment, but in judging a user's contribution? I dealt with trolls and assholes with 50-100k karma back in Reddit, it's not an indication of the quality of a user, just the amount of time they spent in popular subs posting popular content.