When the karma "leaders" was introduced, I found myself paying too much attention to my standing and stressing about what I should be doing to get more karma points and "beat" the next person. I rapidly decided this was silly and counterproductive, especially for meaningless points. Since I lack the willpower to just stop looking (especially when the karma score is at the top of every page), I figured the next best thing was to blow my karma by starting a new account, which forces me to not care about my karma score. I don't mean to cause confusion, let alone start an internet meme :-)
See Tim Harford's "The Logic of Life" for more discussion of ways to force yourself to behave rationally. (This is also the motivation behind the startup stickk.com)
I'd suggest proposing a feature to pg to accomplish what you want without having to continually create new userids. Since he's provided an anti-procrastination feature, he may be open to the idea.
BTW I thought it was interesting that someone (not me) gave you a karma point on your post about not wanting karma points :)
This must already sort-of exist: check out pg himself (http://arclanguage.org/user?id=pg). He's got 1190 karma, whereas almkglor, the current leader, has "only" 660. So somehow, pg's opting out of the "leaderboard" system, at least. If that's the case, it should be in news.arc somewhere (I'll look if I get the chance); of course, there could be some other reason I'm missing.
