If you're going for points (and that's the entire raison d'être for gamification!)

That's the faulty premise. Or rather: it strikes at the weakness of gamification.

Yes, there is a very strong tendency for reward and effort to be grossly mismatched in user-ranked and filtered sites. Guess what: there's a copious amount of similar mismatch in real life. Jobs which are painfully difficult offer little reward, other times a casually tossed off effort may gain endless plaudits.

On HN, I think my top-voted comment remains a sarcastically flip jibe at PHP (a couple of submissions have out-scored it). On reddit, something of a throwaway about terminals vs. glass TTYs (at least it's technical). On the other hand, I scored my first reddit gold, which is to say, someone was sufficiently moved by what I'd written to actually pay something, for a longer and more detailed post, but one which my research of the topic made pretty easy to write.

But that's not why I participate.

My principle objective is to learn, explore, examine, have my own ideas challenged, and generally expand my capabilities and understanding. And used correctly, HN, reddit, and StackExchange all accomplish this pretty well.

The rating systems are there less for the person being rated and more for the benefit of others -- they're a first-level indication of how well trusted and respected someone is ... or how long and obsessively they've been using the service.

A recent HN post (also appearing on reddit) was "We Have to Talk About TED". I wrote my own riff on that: "We Have to Talk About 'We Have to Talk About TED'" (http://redd.it/1te3hz) (and yes, as the woman in the back says, its TEDtles all the way down ...).

The key problem:

There's a fundamental problem with democratic voting processes and voting systems (such as reddit's own post and moderation processes[2] -- which are, in their defense, better than most) in assessing who's qualified to make a judgement -- and then, of course, in determining who's qualified to assess who's qualified.

There's been a strong focus in the online world for the past decade or more over user-moderated discussion. Slashdot was arguably one of the first such sites, many others have come along, most have gone. I think a fundamental misunderstanding is that the most democratic moderation systems are the best. I don't believe this is the case. Rather, any distributed moderation system shares the load of content filtering. Which is a good thing. But distributing that load to those unable to draw meaningful distinctions between "good" and "entertaining" is not useful.

This is most crucial where you're not measuring, say, marketplace potential (where popularity is in fact by and large the metric you're looking for) as opposed to, say, technical correctness. In which tests of suitability are more significant.

And that's the point of StackExchange: it's not a platform with the goal of scoring people the most points, it's a platform on which if you go there with a question, you'll find a good, and hopefully the best, applicable answer. And to that end, I've actually found the site extremely useful.

So: HN, StackExchange, reddit, Facebook, Google+, and other similar sites tend to fall down a bit of a rathole. Clay Shirky's noted that the problem isn't information overload, it's filter failure, but there are also two modes of filter failure: one is filters which are overwhelmed in the classification task and can't keep up. But another is filters which select the wrong stuff.

Which isn't a particularly easy problem to solve. StackExchange actually takes a decent cut at it (as do other services such as Yahoo Answers, though with varying degrees of success) by having the submitter select the best answer. Within the ranking system, this might carry some benefits, and in particular, submitting a lot of wrong, or simply unselected answers, might carry a penalty. Another way to switch up the voting system would be to assign more points for answers to harder, less-answered, or unanswered questions. Or to provide a means of judging between solutions: what's faster, simpler, more comprehensive, more robust, etc.

Which gets down to determining what quality and fitness are. In which case I'd recommend taking another look at Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Though you need not agree entirely with what he has to say.