Support points/reputation system

From what I've understood, it seems like there are maybe three major goals community point/badge systems pursue:

• Promote content that is of high value
• Reward people who make significant contributions
• Enable community moderation in a balanced way

The major traps seem to be:

• Rewarding people for activities that don't create value
• Creating an overly controlling system where people feel feel excluded or spurned.
• Creating a system where long debates readily become the focus instead of setting on a decent answer quickly

All in all, I think StackExchange does a decent job at all of this.

As far as I've understood them, the key ideas it has pursued are:

• The fundamental reward system is points
• There are points which represent your "reputation." It's cool to have high reputation. Some people work very hard to earn it. This is a good thing.
• You almost never earn points simply through activity. This can drive silly activity (e.g., if you were to get rewarded for posting, you might create 1000 silly posts). You get points for doing things which are acknowledged as helpful by others. So, I get points when you vote up my answer or select it as a best answer.
• Even those who don't have many points can use the basic Q&A mechanisms. So, not having a reputation doesn't prevent me from asking or answering questions. I get to play.
• Additional privileges get rewarded through gaining experience
• • There are lots and lots of specific tasks that need to be done to moderate a community. (Editing posts, creating tags, declaring some questions out-of-bounds and closed, ...). These are best done by the community but by proven members of the community. It works well if these privileges are "earned" by people by gaining points
  • This represents a kind of organic middle ground between an unmoderated approach and a top-down approach. The people who the community acknowledges as having made lots of contributions get more juice.
• Other badges get awarded for acknowledging that you've made progress in how you use the site
• This is a way of helping newbies feel good about getting deeper into the community
• So, for example, on StackExchange, when I as a first question, or vote up an answer, or use the comment feature, I get awarded badges.
• These don't really have any functional usage but make me feel good about getting to be more sophisticated
• There generally is not a reason to take negative actions against members
• Most of the action is trying to provide helpful actions to specific questions. It's not much a debate over alternative approaches but rather putting approaches up and letting the original asker and the community to select which one(s) they like
• Mostly, community members who try but don't make valuable contributions will simply see their content passed over (and, if they are interested, will also see what constitutes a preferred reply)
• Given this, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of negative "Here is why you are wrong" kind of conversations. Rather, the "here is the answer I thought was best" rises to the top
• At the same time, those who behave in a way which is clearly out of line (inappropriate questions or responses) may see their content pulled or closed off, by those with the right privileges

All in all, it seems a decent approach to motivating people to contribute, inculculating a positive atmosphere, while making it approachable for anybody to use the support system.

@chipclearly++. Very well explained.

@Fidelix : I think answers are more important than comments in a Q&A system. If they're made (almost) equal then we have a forum, not a Q&A system, even if I got you about parallel statements. But focusing in answering questions is at the heart of a Q&A system. As @chipclearly said, having comments ~= answers is "Creating a system where long debates readily become the focus instead of setting on a decent answer quickly". The solution could be to create an issue if necessary in the proper place, but I'm not sure about it.