How do you handle users gaming the system for profit?
I was thinking up various ways to introduce money to our communication systems to incentivize certain behaviors. But not from the modern Facetwitter perspective of a site that wastes your life by addicting you. The true measure should be the correctness of the content and money should pay for that.
First a system where you have to pay to post and if you post is confirmed as not spam or abuse, then you get the money back. Otherwise the site takes your money. Should be a negligible amount. Mostly a way to make spam expensive and compensate for moderation, but of course a site can abuse a user this way as well.
If a user posts some profound story/comment and others want to compensate him directly with an easy UI, they can add a monetary amount to their upvote. But there is little guarantee that the amount will be significant or the money will arrive promptly. Users should be able to undo money sent for well sounding but ultimately wrong info. This is to discourage participation driven by points and monetary rewards.
If participation and content creation is driven by money even more than it is now, there will be a few new legitimate sources with useful information but the vast majority will be content farms. To discourage this "points" or "money" should accumulate, BUT should not be paid out for years until the accuracy of this content is confirmed by the passage of time, peer review, etc. If mistakes are found, all readers should be notified of corrections. There should be penalties for releasing misleading or mislabeled information (like tech blog posts that are really advertising but pretend not to be. You should pay to advertise and pay more for advertising what turns out to be crap after peer review.)
A site should take its share for moderating content well and working on rules that incentivize useful content/services and penalize attention seeking of little utility.
It's hard to predict effects of various new incentives. But a site should work on modifying the rules until desired results are reached. Users should not stray from normal behavior to satisfy some quick and dirty addicting point systems. If that means limiting participation to select trained users, releasing information to larger audiences only after it has been discussed by relevant experts (so no shocking attention grabbing studies are released) then so be it.