Karma allows you to rate a user’s posts…
so lets say for instance, you post some stupid crap about “look at this tub girl pic!! lololol!!! It’s so awesome!!!” in Gen Auto, your peers can rate you. Give you a good or bad rating on your post. Lots of good ratings = better karma. Noobs who don’t really know people can then tell who is a jackass poster, and who isn’t.
Lots of bad ratings = I’ll probably ignore that post.
Everything is confidential…
I think how it works is - for every couple of good reputation points you get, you can hand out one reputation point… or something like that. I need to find a post on exactly how the system works… but that’s the general idea.