An off-topic aside as preamble - I think one reason (certainly not the only, but one) that people inflate their post count is that they are incentivized to get into the habit of it upon joining FT. Because there are barriers to full access that can only be reached upon hitting certain post counts, there is already an apparent reason to "game" that part of the system. I'm not necessarily advocating change in that mechanism, and even if I were, I wouldn't do it in this thread. But just an aside.

There will always be a (reasonably small, I think) subset of people who - for either competitiveness or self-worth reasons - will take a new metric and make it their mission to game it. I don't think that's a reason to avoid change, although it is an argument to proceed carefully (e.g., with a limited rollout) and observe the results.

My comment about self-policing is that anybody who has done some reading on FT for some time starts to build a list (or a fuzzy sketch or a hazy image or however your brain works) in their head of who is reliable/helpful/thoughtful/funny/"a good poster" - however you define that - and who is not. Heck, just reading through a couple of hundred messages in this one thread can give you that sense. So if someone's posts are inaccurate, thoughtless, or always written in screaming all caps, yet they garnered 100 likes, observers will modify their mental list/sketch/impression accordingly.

The person will be self-liking into ridiculousness. Plus, I heard that if you self-like too much, your hand will freeze that way.