Gilles, I guess that I completely agree with you, only you were able to describe it much more eloquently.
My post was supposed to be much more nuanced than ‘reputation points = a good thing’ and I actually even end up with the (opposite) conclusion that I find reputation points unnecessary.
Reputation points has a good side as it motivates (some) people and allows to differentiate (some) posts (yes this should have been more nuanced by stating ‘some’), but… it is a bit simplistic and very one-sided (it is based on popularity only).
My viewpoint is that this popularity voting thing starts to become a bit old-fashioned and is a thing of the last 10’s in this century but not something for the next decade
(The voting has been mainly used on commercial websites - copied, taken over, on other smaller sites - and is used to get as many people hooked up, addicted, as possible - creating more income. But now we live in a world where everyone is living their lives on internet. We are moving away from those commercialised spaces. We want safe spaces where we converse normally as we do in real live. In real life I may give compliments to other people, but I do not press like buttons continuously or search for people/conversations in lists with high scores.).
I personally want to go back to experts that I trust rather than some massive community generated popularity number that has been created with several sources of underlying randomness and several sources of bias (like how long the post has been on the main page, and how many times it got bumped, is a large influence).
There are several communities that operate without ‘points’ and without a ‘score-board’. Some have become very large and important, like Wikipedia, and some may have some alternative system of endowment like ‘Linked-in’. We should be careful in introducing the voting-system, just because SE/SO does it. Any voting system will fixate how the ‘community’ values the contributions and contributors. But this is unnecessary. Many communities that are without an explicit voting system will still have some sort of way in validating the contributions and contributors. You feel this whenever you step into an online community, you notice directly that there are some players that are widely regarded as the alpha monkeys and act as the high rep contributors. It happens naturally (but when you let it happen naturally it is much more what the community develops and less based on what ways of validation the system/software has created).
A possible way of endowment could be the number of ‘followers’ for posts/tags/contributors (more like twitter). This still will relate to ‘popularity’ but in a milder form (not every contribution is being scored).