I bet at least 25 of those ++'s came from people who didn't even read the node and were just going through it trying to get their own voting bonus. Removing the voting bonus would reduce these situations.

Most people here do seem to take their experience points just a little bit too seriously though. Sure, if you get a bunch of them you can put up a nice pretty picture, maybe get a few more votes to spend on --'ing certain people because their perl skills exceed your own, and you might even get to move some nodes around. As far as I know, no matter what your experience you can still post questions here and reply to other's questions, that's good enough for me.