The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness. It doesn't exist to encourage competition. It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more.
The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership. It doesn't care what you write about. It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative. It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are. It simply designed to promote those who have already succeeded.
And it does this because we assume that those who have gained significant readership of either their articles or their blogs will have written things casual visitors to the site might be interested which in turn might make them more likely to return visit or create a blog themselves.
That's why we have it. And as a practical result, people who consistently write about cool and interesting things tend to gain readers over time who in turn return to read other things they've written.
That's what motivated me to create this site in the first place. I have seen so many good bloggers creating truly insightful things on the net on various "blog" sites only to find that they never get read. Never get comments. And hence get lost in the noise of cyberspace.
But on Joeuser, what you write gets syndicated to other Stardock.net based sites. Recent articles all get their shot by being listed in the newest articles. People who consistently blog have a good chance at being ranked highly. And so that same great blogger, here on JoeUser, is likely to gain a readership.
I've seen, over the past couple of years, bloggers who have left for one reason or another. And they quickly discover that all the comments and readers they got on JoeUser don't transfer too well because, despite how obvious the JoeUser idea is, it is still (to my knowledge) the world's only blog community on the net (of course, given the technical hassles JU has, it's obviously non-trivial to implement such an interconnected system <g>).
The foundation for all this is the points system. Without it, we're just another blogspot or live journal or whatever in which people write in perfect isolation. And I don't know about others, but if I wanted to write things that no one else was going to read, I'd keep a private journal . 