My "cobbled together" implementation is as follows: every user begins with a fixed number of "bolts"; they can unlock more bolts through various "virtuous deeds" (TBD), or they can earn bolts through their comments/posts; their general "bolt throughput" is a proxy to how much "karma" they've earned and given to others.
Though this was cobbled together without any real understanding of behavioral economics and with a whole bunch of untested assumptions, so as it evolves, I'll have to study the tried-and-tested models of Medium, Reddit, HN, and think about what works, what doesn't, what Karma users need/want, and then innovate upon that assessment if needed. I have some thoughts on that but I'm still battling some stability dragons over here...
Thanks again for poking around and helping out.
HN just uses karma points for moderation/access so its not quite as handy but I think people respect people with lots of Karma. Like I know there's one person with over 300k karma points here, he's a pretty cool dude and I think his points reflect that.