Meta keywords? Need to be deleted or harmless?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions G+ community.

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  Sarah Barry: Meta keywords..... need to be deleted or harmless??  ;Any thoughts?  ;Sorry didn't introduce my self....Hi, I'm Sarah and I'm new x
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  Ligatures.Net: Meta keywords are harmless, because they are not taken into account by search engines for ranking. No need to delete them.
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  Federico Sasso: Mostly harmless (cit. Douglas Adams :)
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  Mach Page Speed: For me...I always delete them.
  I see no value in having them.
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  Sarah Barry: I have 100's of pages with them.....don't want to have to delete unless I really need to
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  Mach Page Speed:  ;what kind of site are you running? Templated type like Wordpress or straight html? ;
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  Sarah Barry: I am on a Create site....
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  Dave Elliott: mostly harmless although if you play in the dark greys you might want to delete them as bing uses them as a way to check if the page is low quality or not, so if you are borderline it may flag up the page and penalise you.
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  Mach Page Speed: Not sure what a "Create" site is....never of heard that term before.  ;Is it the site connected to your profile?
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  Sarah Barry:  ;Dark greys??
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  Sarah Barry:  ;Create.com is a site builder ;
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  Mach Page Speed: Hey  ;when you refer to dark greys are you referring to white, black and grey SEO?
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  Dave Elliott: the other negetive about meta keywords is that it makes it remarkably easy for your competitors to work out what you are trying to rank for.
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  Mach Page Speed:  ;ok...looks like templates.  ;Is there a specific reason why you feel you need/don't need to removed them?
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  Sarah Barry: But they could see that in Meta titles and descriptions couldn't they?
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  Sarah Barry: I don't want to spend hours deleting them if I don't need or if it could be damaging to
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  Mach Page Speed: I guess I was looking more towards what lead up to the question.  ;Are you just cleaning up the site, you read something about keywords being positive/negative, your site took a drop in searches, etc. ;
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  Sarah Barry:  ;Ahhh ok....I was advised that they are no longer needed and can be damaging.  ;I asked the question as I wasn't' sure whether to take the advice
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  Mach Page Speed: See I specialize in page speed...so anything that has no value will get removed.  ;What I refer to as low lying fruit. Others here will look at it from a different angle and make their comments.
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  Sarah Barry: This is exactly what I wanted though....to gauge different people's opinions rather than listen to one man... Thanks x
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  Mach Page Speed: Well...if it is not broke don't not fix it....unless you see that it is hurting you, your are not in the SERP position you want to be and in a position to fix it while fixing other issues (one being page speed, redesign, etc).  ;I wouldn't go out of my way to fix just this.
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  Tim Capper: I saw a wwbmaster hangout where google says, ordinarily we ignore meta keywords BUT we reserve the right to use these as spam signals.
  
  You have not said how many you have on each page, if I come a across a new client that has tons, I reduce these down to two and leave it at that.
  
  Have never been negatively affected. 
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  Sarah Barry: Yeah I have quite a lot on each page.... Reducing will have to wait though, too busy making pretty things this side of Christmas...
  Thank you 
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  Dave Elliott:  ;dark greys as in verging on black hat seo strategies. So basically if you are doing borderline dodgy stuff.