I will probably never get to 500 because the only way I can "downvote" is to post a challenging, dismissive, or otherwise negative comment. Which people don't really like. Since I don't care at all about karma, I also cannot be bothered to carefully craft intelligent-seeming pedagogery, to humble-brag, to spam, or any other form of whoring, subtle or blatant. Oh well.

Karma-whoring will be counterproductive if the community doesn't solicit/reward such behaviour. And this attitude of the community has more or less thwarted karma-whoring till now. We'll see how this works out in future.

Really? How do you realise it is carma whoring on such a high niveau portal? I see many comments stating the obvious getting their upvotes, not contributing anything useful to a topic. It is still carma whoring, just on a high niveau. This is what such a system creates and it forces you to scroll more to find the really useful comment. I know it works, I did it too ;)

Removing the system completly while integrating a clever report-system would have been more useful here imho.