On the plus side, they could incentivize posters to try harder to make quality posts. It could be a good system in some respects.
It already started to have that effect I noticed after theymos's implementation of the Merit 'system'. In some cases it's very obvious that people are posting in a very forced manner to obtain a Merit or two, but at least they put time and effort into their posts, and that's something we can all be happy with, and especially so when we're a few months away from now. I am glad that theymos allocated his precious time to getting this Merit system up and running -- people for so long were complaining about theymos to not do anything about spammers, and now it shows that he does actually do something to prevent further spamming.
Not exactly the same, but the general idea is the same.