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.
