[darklajid]

Not for a community I'd like to be part of.

Every single one of these 'rewards' leads to people trying to game the system, which leads to noise. You know the drill:

- SO is full of people that jump at new answers, try to 'win' by submitting early and editing their answer later. "More text formatting = better". Needs. More. Bullet. Points.

- HN submissions are 'valuable' so that we had automated submissions or bookmarklets in the past.

That's karma alone, and your other suggestions are even worse in my book, because they could be exchanged for money much easier (iPad, deals, your direct exchange option) and therefor could be gamed as 'part time jobs'.

Is that bad? Depends, I guess, on your target audience. In my opinion the people that go for there rewards are usually not (in general) part of your preferred audience. And since you'll have a hard time judging quality in a community site the people that push out most (even if it is crappy/below average or borderline spam) win.

[pmorel]

Having full-time employees (as opposed to paying random people) creating the content and paid by for the quality of the content rather by the content would be better then. As long as there is an issue way to evaluate their "quality".