We should put all possible changes/reforms in a big list, that everyone can upvote/downvote, agree disagree.
EA is governed but a set of core EAs, so if you want change, I suggest that giving them less to read and a strong signal of community consensus is good.
The top-level comments should be a short clear explanation of a possible change. If you want to comment on a change, do it as a reply to the top level comment
This other post gives a set of reforms, but they are a in a big long list at the bottom. Instead we can have a list that changes by our opinions! https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/54vAiSFkYszTWWWv4/doing-ea-better-1
Note that I do not agree with all comments I post here.
This is a mechanism for maintaining cultural continuity.
Karma represents how much the community trusts you, and in return, because you are trusted, you're granted greater ability to influence what others see because your judgement has been vetted over a long series of posts. The increase in voting power is roughly logarithmic with karma, so the increased influence in practice hits diminishing returns pretty quickly.
If we take this away it allows the culture of the site to drift more quickly, say because there's a large influx of new folks. Right now existing members can curate what happens on the Forum. If we take away the current voting structure, we're at greater risk of this site becoming less the site the existing user base wants.
I don't speak for the Forum by any means, but as I see it we're trying to create a space here to talk about certain things in a certain way, and that means we want new people to learn the norms and be part of what exists first before they try to change it, since outsiders often fail to understand why things work the way they do until they've gotten enough experience to see how the existing mechnismism make things work. Once you understand how things work, it becomes possible to try to change things in ways that keeps what works and changes what doesn't. The voting mechanism is downstream of this and is an important tool of the membership to curate the site.
That said, you can also just ignore the votes if you don't agree with them and read whatever you want.