The thing is that in the current karma model, karma simply can't be treated as currency, because every time someone upvotes something, that karma is drawn anew from the aether, it's not a transfer of existing electronic karma bills or anything like that. You can't even say there's an infinite bank it comes from, because there's not. Karma currently exists only as a ranking, and although that's a goal in itself for some people, I'd say it's not for everyone.
That's true of upload ratio as well, but that doesn't seem to cause issues for what.cd
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: