Couldn't a mob from someplace like 4chan game such a system with a dadaist inversion of constructive/helpful? The result would be a little like Bizzaro-world. Or maybe like 4chan!

To a degree it is, here and on sites like Stack Overflow, by doling out privileges based on karma. Randall has just described a more extreme version of the same idea, where membership itself is one of those privileges.