I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it.

I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.

Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into reputation systems in general?

Randy Farmer's "Building Web Reputation Systems" is a good start:

http://buildingreputation.com

There's a blog, book, and wiki.

Some keyword searches: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+sys...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20s...

This can be solved by moderation. Not voting, old school approach of moderators removing things. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ still has quite a high standard, and that's because they have strict moderation.

You can't have "democracy" and "voting" and "algorithms" and then have high content.