I agree. I personally don't really want to listen to people that care immensely about their karma scores.

I think an exponential decay on how much karma you get based on upmods per second would be sufficient to avoid people rampantly upmodding. It takes time to read an article and its comments, and it seems like measuring that would be an effective way of preventing rampant abuse.

Of course, people could just write scripts then to upmod all the time once they figured out the optimal delay. Then there would be an entirely different form of karma inflation to fight. Like spam, it seems to be a never ending battle.