But for me, blogging has nowt to do with making points nor money—I’ve only made a total of like $50 this year from the many hours I’ve spent writing. If I cared about money, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on my blog and vlog. What I do care about is having fun, making my ideas heard, and talking with new and interesting people.
Upvotes tell me how relevant my ideas are to the real world and other people’s interests, which in turn helps me become a better writer and a better thinker.
The idea being that you give karma to another person by taking it from your own stash. Up votes would cost you money. But how do downvotes work? Do you take another person's points away? That doesn't work because humans are greedy.
I suspect that many offers for consultation come in to HN's top commenters and many of the things they say get noticed above the sayings of the common pleb. If you have a high amount of karma, I think it's definitely worth some money.
What problem would that solve? How would that even be realistic the way you describe? This doesn't make any sense at all and here's why:
If karma is worth money then where does the initial money come from? Does PG give everyone 1500 to start like it's Monopoly? Do you put up the money yourself?
Assuming you put up your own money it just isn't fair. The richest of us get more influence and the poor get none. It'll actually work a lot like the real US economy.
Then, if karma is worth money then wouldnt it make sense to be able to withdraw it and use it in places other than HN? So what if you get people hoarding karma then they withdraw it all and end up with one. Imagine some of the very well respected people here suddenly having no karma at all because they withdrew it and spend it on a new computer.
It's just not realistic and it defeats the whole purpose of karma. If it's only good on HN then it isn't worth money. The way it works now is probably the fairest way possible. If karma is one measure of the quality of a user's contributions and how much respect they have earned then making karma work like money would totally undermine its value. Right now, karma is earned. In a money scenario there are more chances to game the system and skew it both positively and negatively for a user.
If you want to give someone money then check out their profile and see if you can either donate to one of their projects through PayPal or Flattr or something or you can just send an email and ask.