Back in the day, I thought the stuff for the avatar was an allowance system; you could only get things that totaled to your level of ++ but not beyond it.

I at first thought you had to buy them and then you would spend ++s.

I first thought you had to earn the right to -- by having enough ++, but I didn't want to ask how many because it would have looked stupid.

Instead, I ran through the ++ score of people who ++ed my posts to establish a lower bound - which turned out to be below my own score already.

Next idea was to disable the cosmetics filter of uBlock Origin. Worked. :-)