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High karma on hacker news may not translate to a high reputation on a writer's blog, but it would pretty much guarantee a civil, thoughtful comment. In this way karma is pretty portable, you just have to give everyone karma somehow. Maybe start off by trusting friends of people with high karma.

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That may be what you look for on HN, but that's not true of all forums (I trust that you can think of one obvious counterexample).

Even look at Reddit - trolls are usually downvoted, sure, but a lot of people with high reputation are really just novelty accounts. That's not bad for Reddit, but that's not what I would associate with high reputation on HN.

And finally, look at one of the comments below about gaming the system - that's the problem with having a (displayed) numeric value associated with one's reputation.

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