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Negative rep?!


longbyte1

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I think negative repping is a Bad Idea. The potential for trolling, vendetta, and hurt feelings is immense. Better IMO that we can lift others up but not bring them down.

People on this forum aren't like that. Are you guys?

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I'll put in my 2 cents.

I don't want to see a negative repping system. Just go to bodybuilding.com/misc to see how it works. They have that feature and it gets abused all the time. It creates 2 types of people, greens and reds. People judge each other and their posts based on their rep count instead of merit. Reds have anything they say discounted immediately or someone says "You're just a red so STFU". This forum is one of the great communities out there and nobody wants to see the bb.com miscer mentality here.

- - - Updated - - -

People on this forum aren't like that. Are you guys?

No, I don't think people are generally like that here but there will always be a small number of people that are.

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No, I don't think people are generally like that here but there will always be a small number of people that are.

I'll add something here; a lot of people might be tempted to down-vote, or add negative opinions to a good idea as a knee-jerk reaction (Myself included, to be honest), but generally, in this system, you have to write a post to do that. Now, then you actually THINK of a reason WHY it's a bad idea. Then, more knee-jerk reactions are avoided, and people actually THINK THINGS THROUGH. Simply put...

listen_to_yourself.png

-Source: xkcd (Note: This would probably be a good idea. However, if someone makes this, make a way to defeat it is to attempt posting a comment that's just "Swordfish", so I can get rid of it. Youtube developers, I'm looking at you. All programmers have at least some sense of humour, right?)

edit: Also, regarding the "green/red" distinction point, one could argue that the same thing can already be done by postcount/rep ratio, but to figure that out, you'd need to think about it, and the more time you need to think about it, the more time your opinion has to cultivate in your brain. To grow. Simply put, think about it for a while, and you'll instantly be smarter in pretty much every case.

Edited by Norpo
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I think negative repping is a Bad Idea. The potential for trolling, vendetta, and hurt feelings is immense. Better IMO that we can lift others up but not bring them down.

I think positive repping is also a bad idea. The potential for clique creation(ergo the 'Green light people' thread), forced white knighting and segregation amongst a base of people that should be homogenious is immense. Better IMO that we can lift others up without making them part of 'something special that other people should aim to be'.

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I honestly cannot see any way to be 'lifting people up' without in some fashion putting them on a pedestal like that. Even if the system as it currently is was entirely removed, people would still find some metric (or invent one) as a reason to do this.

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I think positive repping is also a bad idea. The potential for clique creation(ergo the 'Green light people' thread), forced white knighting and segregation amongst a base of people that should be homogenious is immense. Better IMO that we can lift others up without making them part of 'something special that other people should aim to be'.

Rep them privately, not publicly. Though repping in general is unneeded, it is a lazy alternative to real communication - like Facebook likes.

The systems seems to have little merit as it is. Highly valuable people only score a few bars because they hang out with people that do not care about repping, while some people have many bars with very little worthwhile contributions because they hang out in rep happy circles.

Edited by Camacha
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I honestly cannot see any way to be 'lifting people up' without in some fashion putting them on a pedestal like that. Even if the system as it currently is was entirely removed, people would still find some metric (or invent one) as a reason to do this.

I.E. Post Count. There's an alarming dropoff rate there: most people are under 1000 posts.

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Hide post counts. Problem solved.

But then everything is too dry. There should be some kind of disparity between users, else, no one knows if the person replying is worth listening to or not.

I do have some qualms with the Reputation system. The amount of rep one has is dependent on many, many things: What they are being repped for, their post count, join date, general forum fame, current reputation. And as mentioned before: Some members of the community are repped because the users who view the posts enjoy repping, while others, who should really be getting the rep (Like our amazing modding community) seem to recieve very little of it.

[/rant]

Edited by Starwhip
TOO, not to. Stupid grammar .... inside of me. :(
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But then everything is too dry. There should be some kind of disparity between users, else, no one knows if the person replying is worth listening to or not.

I do have some qualms with the Reputation system. The amount of rep one has is dependent on many, many things: What they are being repped for, their post count, join date, general forum fame, current reputation. And as mentioned before: Some members of the community are repped because the users who view the posts enjoy repping, while others, who should really be getting the rep (Like our amazing modding community) seem to recieve very little of it.

[/rant]

There's a simple of you knowing if the answer is worth taking into consideration or not: Reading it.

After all, we're not making life/death decisions here. We're just reading opinions posted by other people that may or may not agree with our point of view.

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But then everything is too dry. There should be some kind of disparity between users, else, no one knows if the person replying is worth listening to or not.

How is a system that says nothing about the quality of the post going to help you differentiate posts based on their quality? Neither post count nor rep has anything to do with the average post quality of the user.

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But then everything is too dry. There should be some kind of disparity between users, else, no one knows if the person replying is worth listening to or not.

I do have some qualms with the Reputation system. The amount of rep one has is dependent on many, many things: What they are being repped for, their post count, join date, general forum fame, current reputation. And as mentioned before: Some members of the community are repped because the users who view the posts enjoy repping, while others, who should really be getting the rep (Like our amazing modding community) seem to recieve very little of it.

Now you see that this discussion is beginning to hit bedrock. You've pinpointed a fundamental, almost philosophical, problem that forum operators have debated over for a long time: who's worth listening to? How does one quantify the "usefulness" of a forum member over time in a nonbiased fashion (so that the elites don't gather all the rep from fame and glory)?

Jeff Atwood et al. have attempted to solve this problem by creating The Algorithmâ„¢ and placing it in their Q&A site, Stack Overflow. Obviously, The Algorithm has not been perfected and still favors the elites. The Algorithm does not govern Stack Overflow by itself; it requires those with >10k to help out in moderating.

The true Algorithm has not been found yet. So we can never truly quantify who are the top 10 most useful, helpful, intelligent people on the face of this forum.

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On another forum, mostly about a particular space-set game, one of the jokes there, is the existence or otherwise of "Rep Cartels".

That is, there are particular groups who may, or may not, +rep all posts by one of their members, while -rep'ing all posts by someone taking the opposing side in an argument.

It's also a vBulletin forum.

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How is a system that says nothing about the quality of the post going to help you differentiate posts based on their quality? Neither post count nor rep has anything to do with the average post quality of the user.

If you're not gonna even read and think about what's being said(which, surprisingly enough, is a way a of deeming the quality of something), then what's the point of even being a member of a forum?

Highly regarded users are also capable of making mediocre remarks and .... poor responses. So, how your 'perfectly calibrated' reputation system goes around that? Also, it's also proven that two people can say the exact same thing at different times, but only 'special users' will get noticed and CREDITED as such, even though they just 'copied' what was said by someone else first. Symbolic authority wins every time.

Once again, why are people so keen on being 'certified'?

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On another forum, mostly about a particular space-set game, one of the jokes there, is the existence or otherwise of "Rep Cartels".

That is, there are particular groups who may, or may not, +rep all posts by one of their members, while -rep'ing all posts by someone taking the opposing side in an argument.

It's also a vBulletin forum.

If we notice something like that going on here, we would without a doubt do something, I'm sure. We don't tolerate users posting just for the sake of bumping their post count, so I think we'd be pretty harsh on users abusing the reputation system too.
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If we notice something like that going on here, we would without a doubt do something, I'm sure. We don't tolerate users posting just for the sake of bumping their post count, so I think we'd be pretty harsh on users abusing the reputation system too.

I maybe too suspicious, but I think this is already happening cleverly in disguise...

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