I agree, which is why I support downplaying the egoistic elements of online communities. Hiding usernames where possible, hiding raw karma scores or post ratings, etc. The less systemic/administrative information plastered all over the place, the more the users will (hopefully) focus on content.
On the other hand, I think the HN karma system has worked well to maintain focus in the site; lame attempts at humor get smacked hard, as do "+1" posts, coarse language, ad hominem arguments, etc. If the post rating were hidden, you wouldn't know if a down-voted post was due to one person disagreeing with you or a major breach of etiquette.
(Of course, in several ways, karma is a poor motivator for behavior that is valuable to the community.)
Yes, I'd say Hacker News has done an unbelievably good job of keeping things good around here. I am your typical Digg->Reddit->Hacker News migrator (I stayed on Reddit WAY too long...).
If anything, I say that here at HN we use "karma" as more of an indicator of RELEVANCY. Upmod comments that are relevant to the discussion, and leave it alone otherwise (very similar to the conclusion of the linked article).
I agree. I think one would have to have some sort of automatic moderation in place. Something like the Robot 9000 built for the xkcd IRC channel that moderates on the basis of originality (such that duplicate noise comments get chatters a temporary muting). Perhaps one-liners below a certain length could be posted at a score of 0 instead of 1. Other automatic wordfilters could also aid in downplaying the user-as-judge-and-jury aspect of moderation.
