The only thing I've noticed over the years is sometimes there seems to be an bias in voting tendencies.  Sometimes some members will receive, what I consider to be, a disproportionate amount of up votes or down votes for a given post that lacks substantial substance.  In those cases a members reputation is what I view to be the 'real' driving force behind those votes.  If anything, I'd consider a cap for maximum votes attainable for a given post either way, up or down.  As well as cap the amount of up or down votes a single user can give to a unique user on a given day, or maybe week cycle.  That is of course if such ideas are even being considered.  

I really dislike this system personally. Lumping trolling, being wrong and havng unpopular opinions into a single counter is wrong, problematic and makes the score unclear, many posts are never rated or just rated +/-1, etc. The number is also not meaningful enough, I'd much prefer some sort of label (wrong, trolling, I don't like it, etc.) or short description near each downvote. It's also weird that community policing itself costs the policing users points (and the cost is too small to prevent abuse and abuse prevention is for administration to investigate manually anyway).

I'm also not a big believer in community policing via such counters in the first place thanks to reddit (which I avoid like a plague) but of course administration here is leagues above theirs so that helps (but if a system needs to be marginalized and have so many technical safety checks and hard working humans put on it then is it a good system in the first place?). It also makes everything timid - to make a controversial statement and push the limits (and in some circles it's controversial to say C or C++ are not 'dead and obsolete' and okay to be programmed in...) you need to care about discussion here but not care about points - which are at odds in my opinion, so everything becomes lukewarm.

I think trolls should be dealt with via reports and moderation and people who are wrong should be debunked and readers provided an answer or explanation of why they were wrong, not rely on this vague counter (which is often empty anyway and may include downvotes for controversy, rude tone, etc. and not just factual errors). That said I never seen any large scale abuse or misuse of this system as someone else described but I seldom use GD too.

I took a quick look at my post history and it only enforces in me this uselessness and negativity - some posts of mine where I elaborate at length about the very specific topic at hand and which took me an hour to write each have 0 points, some where I just link to someone's blog, another thread or documentation that took me literally a minute to make have 1 or several.

Those long 0 point posts I made had a thankful recipient and were a very good discussion (it was about game writing so it was open ended) but he just didn't upvote them. I similarly almost never use the upvote/downvote system (although these days I almost never use GD). Points feel cold compared to just someone saying they understand everything with a 'thanks' in there for a good measure.

I also remember another story but can't find that one post now but it had to be there (the other forum has no points and doesn't deal with PHP or SQL ever)
Basically:
1. Someone asks a PHP SQL question.
2. Someone else tells them to "just google it, it's a common topic".
3. I write a lengthy post about the fact you can't just tell people to google it because Google results change overtime, are presonalized to person's location and search history, often bring up bad tutorials (I even show that for me it brought a tutorial that just pastes raw user input into SQL, no escaping, no mention of injection danger) or GD itself (so you Google and first answer is thread telling you to Google), defeat purpose of a forum, etc.
4. My post gets a -1 because of course it does.

I know it's not about the points (as I said - the forum I do use actively has no points or anything social network-y like that) but I'd be lying if I said I'm not potentially influenced by it, even if subconsciously.

On another (or only, I don't really say I use GD at this point) forum I use I once got a private message thanking me for the fix after I found the source of a bug a user has reported and my PR got merged into master on GitHub finally. It was the sweetest warm fuzzy feeling ever, I'd not take a million of GD post upvotes over it.

To be fair, I'm not sure what would have to happen to make me use GD at this point. I'm definitely not saying anything like "remove points system and I'll browse daily and answer question"! It's a miracle I've seen this thread or the New Year challenge (or was that an email?). Then again I feel I've wasted an hour writing this stuff here.