My thoughts - why do likes accumulate to a user? You want likes to signal that the article/comment is interesting. But what value is it to assign the number of likes to the person who posts it? Like in stack overflow, I haven't used it for ages but my points are still there, they should die off after a while I feel. This would remove the karma chasing you get on reddit and would, perhaps, make things more reasonable. It's nice to get the serotonin kick when you accumulate thousands of points on a post - but its fundamentally meaningless and encourages weird behaviour.