perhaps it is, but I'm not convinced. if food, eating, whatever were an unnecessary and wasteful system then the growing of food and processing, production, etc would likewise be a waste of resources, human labour included. a lot of our work does go towards food production, supply, processing, etc - if you could switch to an alternate system that dispensed with food but didn't otherwise alter our lives, that would surely be massively preferable. it's hard to imagine because eating is such a fundamental need, but that's just a limitation of this comparison.
if we could dispense with money but otherwise have society look much the same (or better, which I think it undoubtedly would be), that would be an improvement, to me, just by virtue of freeing up the labour of all the people who work solely in the overhead of the system. to imagine how else we might function as a society, I think it's useful to identify ways in which the present system is inefficient.
I would distinguish between providing a service & creating value. the service that banks and insurance provide is useful, but only in the context of a money-centric society. they don't create anything that has a purpose deprived of context, it's only the moving around of numbers.
I think having some form of "I agree with this" or similar helps to make you feel engaged with the content (for better or worse).
I think perhaps the actual person responsible for the post or comment shouldn't be able to see the results, though, otherwise it just becomes another ego building thing, and you see people strategising explicitly to build karma like on reddit. instead, the author should see a rating, like "slight approval" "mixed feelings" "strong dissent", etc.