Are there people willing to purchase LessWrong karma with Second Life dollars, World of Warcraft money, or even real US dollars?
If it were possible to sell LessWrong karma for a dollar a point, some people could quit their jobs and write for LessWrong full time.
One problem is that this would in itself probably devalue karma against the dollar.
An alternate system would be to add another button next to 'thumbs up' that would use paypal to pay people a dollar directly for a clever comment or $5 for a post.
(This raises an interesting question: Would the karma system be more informative if we had no downvotes? As it stands, a karma of +/- 2 is usually a strong signal; but for a controversial comment, that doesn't rise above the noise.)
LW Karma is in all objectivity worth less than a dollar a point. You can earn twenty karma just for a statement being particularly witty even if it's fairly obvious to the clever in the context of the post made, such as saying "I'm not!" in response to a post characterizing LWers as contrarian. Then we're asking where the money comes from -- singinst can't have that kind of money in its coffers, they're not just going to ship $100 to anyone who's lurked on the site long enough to rack up a hundred points. At this value I'd peg karma closer to a cent.
Currently, LWers get +1 karma for a comment upvote, and +10 karma for a main post upvote. But clearly, there are other valuable things LWers could do for the community besides writing comments and posts. Writing isn't everyone's forte. Why not award karma for doing productive non-writing things? It's probably not optimal that karma and the community status that comes with it are awarded only for the thing that myself and a few other people are good at. For example, I really wish LW could award karma to programmers for improving LW.
The challenge is doing it fairly, in a way that doesn't alienate too many people. But there might be a workable way to do this, so let's explore.
Perhaps tasks could be assigned karma award amounts by LW editors (Nesov, Eliezer, Louie, etc.), or even just one person who is appointed as the Karma Genie.
Examples: