a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren’t “Introduce yourself!” had a decent karma requirement.
b) You’d end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I’m an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don’t have much karma as a consequence, and I’d think it’d be to the community’s detriment if I was excluded for that reason.
I’d worry that:
a) It would be incredibly difficult to initially accumulate karma to begin with if it turned out that most posts that weren’t “Introduce yourself!” had a decent karma requirement.
b) You’d end up excluding non-regulars who might have very substantial contributions to specific discussions from participating in those discussions. For example, I’m an economist, and most of my posts have been and probably will be in topics that touch on economic concepts. But I don’t have much karma as a consequence, and I’d think it’d be to the community’s detriment if I was excluded for that reason.