I voted 'yes.'
Having been on a few forums and run some myself, I would say I don't think "karma" is very appropriate. I'm sorry I haven't had time to read all of the posts, but here's my thoughts. I would just like to state that I am NOT mentioning anybody on FeralHeart personally in this post: I'm going to quote Garganator, but there is nothing written here personally about anybody. It is simply about my own experiences on other forums.
From what I have seen, it is pretty frequent that people nuzzle(exalt) their friends and it seems fairly easy to rationalise this with a "valid" reason. Is friendship really a good reason to boost points?
Smiting/biting people who might disagree with you or for personal reasons offsite is something that I have come across personally before.
I would think it is extremely easy for somebody who might disagree with the general tone of a thread to have their points knocked for seeming annoying or unamicable because they have ideas you reject, even if they state them politely, which is unfair. Again, I have witnessed this. The personal opinions of other users should NOT, in my opinion, directly affect your profile.
I also would like to comment that I think, no matter how open-minded you are, if you see somebody with "-90 karma" you are probably a little more likely to make negative assumptions about them as adverse to someone with high karma. We are all prone to being at least a little assumptive because that is human nature.
From what I gather, the main points of karma are to a) provide feedback to the user and/or b) display this feedback to others. (Considering it is not a private system viewable only to the user, but to the public as well, I would say it is both.)
The feedback to the user is hard not to take personally: "I feel achieved when I am nuzzled." What about if you were bitten? You'd probably feel the opposite, right? It's a system that need not be there: I would rather feel I'd achieved something because I did somebody a nice favour rather than recieving +1. It's a superficial and fictitious reward system and it is not an accurate representation of anyone. You cannot do a black-and-white sum of how "nice" and "helpful" somebody is because it is all in the eye of the beholder. In the past, even some people who I find extremely rude, callous, ungracious and downright annoying sometimes have a lot karma! No doubt, they probably feel very achieved and their egos very much stroked!
I also think karma veers dangerously in the direction of creating classes. I have seen people advertising virtual goods state in their own rules, "If your karma is in the -ves, do not apply. I can't trust you." Ouch!
In short, I definitely think we should get rid of karma. It doesn't serve much of a purpose, in my opinion, other than to create classes and unsupported projected images of people that are wholly inaccurate.
Oh, I would also just like to note that I have always had what I'd consider to be "high" karma, from what I remember.
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