[CobrastanJorji]

It can't just be money. It also has to remove any notion of score or ranking. There should be NO incentive to artificially increase anything.

Look at Advent of Code. Free site, fun community, but it had a leaderboard. The moment AI was advanced enough, it began dominating the leaderboard. The solution: kill the leaderboard. Sure, you can still solve all the problems with AI and get yourself full points, but you're not competing against anybody, so why bother?

As soon as you can get ahead of others at something, even for something as stupid as a karma score on Reddit or on Hacker News, somebody's going to want to increase it badly enough to start cheating.

[andrewflnr]

Maybe. That's a bit of a different problem: similar mechanic, but much weaker forces with some different pros and cons. Maximizing imaginary internet points is qualitatively different from maximizing actual power in the form of money. I think there's still room to experiment with aligning the incentives on things like karma for community-driven moderation.

[klez]

If moderation is the problem maybe only allow downvoting? Of course that may bring to the surface a different set of problems (no solution is without drawbacks), but it removes the "numbers go up" incentives.