I've always kind of found the total points to be a bit irrelevant. But I do take karma into account when posting which probably would prevent me from ever breaking into the top 100 of total points but does prevent me from posting every silly thing that comes into my head[1]. It seems karma's a more relevant metric for value then total.

1. Like this :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362307