[META] Karma: Why & What?

OK, here's what I think the boundaries are for power...

15 points - You can upvote (and add comments I think).

100 points - You can downvote (and flag maybe)

400 points - You can edit other people's stuff (so I could copy Eric's answer, deface his one, and get the karma myself). Also you can retag questions.

1000 points - You can close questions.

http://answers.unity3d.com/page/faq.html

This says:

Here's how it works: if you post a good question or helpful answer, it will be voted up by your peers: you gain 15 reputation points. If you post something that's off topic or incorrect, it will be voted down: you lose 5 reputation points. Amass enough reputation points and Unity Answers will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions:

 15    Have questions and answers submitted to site
 15    Vote up
 50    Flag offensive, close own question
 100    Vote down (costs 2 rep), edit community wiki posts
 500    Redirect questions
 1000    View moderation queue and approve contributions
 2000    Edit other people's posts
 5000    Close any questions
 10000    Delete any post, convert answers to comments and vice versa

At the high end of this reputation spectrum there is little difference between users with high reputation and moderators. That is very much intentional. We don't run Unity Answers. The community does.

The page, however, does not seem to have been updated since UDN had come out.

The simplest advice is just to be a good citizen. We should ignore the mechanics used to measure that, since otherwise we risk gaming the system, which just makes extra work for qato (who then need to modify it to filter out misbehaviour).

Who knows, maybe they'll later add the important metric of subtracting 2000 from anyone who mentions Karma or Elephant (except if they also use the safeword Shazzam).

Long Answer:
You get Karma if people like you. If you get enough karma, you can do cool things like edit posts, and up/down vote answers/questions. Basically, If you are voted up by the members of the community, Unity trusts you.

Short Answer:
This is all you need to know.

  function Update() {

      if(Karma > infinity){

          Matrix.CanFly = true;

      }

  }