I am not a fan of internet currency in all its forms generally because it draws attention away from the argument.

Reddit, which this is based on, went to disabling a subtractive karma rule for all submissions and comments. Submissions with down votes greater than up votes just don't go anywhere while negative comment votes get buried similar to how they do here. That seems like a good way to organize the system.

Is the reason that it was implemented in order to be signaling for other users or is it just an artifact of the reddit API? Would disabling the actual display of the "points" simultaneously disable the comment ranking? What would be the most rational way to organize the comments. The least biased way would be for it to be based on time. The current way and the way reddit works is direct democracy and that of course is the tyranny of the majority. The current way may be the most efficient if the readers have such a high vale of their time that they only have time to read the most popular comments and skip the rest. However even if that is efficient it is not necessarily optimized to elucidate the best discussion points as users typically vote up things that they agree with rather than strong arguments.

I personally do not submit more responses and posts because of the karma system. As I have seen heavily on reddit, there is karma momentum where people tend to vote similar to how others have voted (as human nature would dictate). Based on that, I know that people will reference the total points of submitters and make decisions on how to take their comments and suggestions in light of that primed information - when the arguments should be evaluated independently.

Maybe I'm missing something though.