Can’t help but think making a list of people by karma just encourages karma farming

Amusingly, HN used to have an "average karma per comment" measure which I thought was interesting. It doesn't any more.

I'm assumed that was why the karma scores for the top ten users aren't visible - you can karma farm your way to the top ten but after that you're blind: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Maybe psychologically that helps people think "why bother?"

You can click any of those profiles and see their karma, or some number claiming to be anyway.

Nah. You just set the prize at top 10.