Digg has it's own "karma points". Does it really need it?

It's probably been discussed hundres times before on reddit and internet in general and there is probably no clear answer. Shall we spark the discussion again?

So it's bascially a reputation system, that's supposed to help consumers check if the account is reliable and a be motivation for content creators who can feel good about themselves. In theory it should promote content from accounts "worth following" because people will follow those with more karma more likely.

My opinion:

The problem is some people see it, maybe subconsciously as a game and their posts and comments will be optimzed for karma farming. Which is not very organic and human-like which we want digg to be. And other closely related issue is that this will encourage the discussions to be one sided and conformative, as people won't want their karma to drop so they won't try to post / comment things that are against a general consensus. This is what reddit has and it generates bubbles where everybody agrees with everybody. Sounds like an anti-discussion pattern.

Obviously in theory the points help other people to quickly judge if the account is reliable as there can be somebody with the same amount of posts / comments but drastically different karma. And it will be useful if somebody will try to prove that 2 + 2 = 5. But only then. It will be useful with facts. It won't help with opinions though as people will give negative karma to posts and comments they don't agree with, so in general the comments against general consensus will be in general downvoted. And we might wonder what percentage of content on platforms like that are opinions, but surely majority. Unless we want to create a comfy place like reddit where people are safe from opinions they don't agree with.

The thing is, even without the karma system, there still might be "comfy", communities, but it's the moderator who blocks / deletes the opinions that they think should not be on their community, they would serve as a sort of a guard who filters content. Moderators already do that on reddit, but thanks to the karma system, they don't have that much work, because the system filters out the content by itself.

So the question is where we should put the "opinion guard", or the "content guard" - should it be solely the community moderator, or should the system affect/help with that by creating systems like karma points?

I think it should be only the community moderator. This way we are encouraging all kinds of points of view and if your point of view is not respected in one community, you should be able to quickly find the alternate community where your points of view are respected or at least not removed.

What do you think?