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Originally Posted by SilverSmoke
Still it doesn't take a genius to see people are getting driven away from here as a result of a more negative atmosphere that's being fueled by the reputation system in combination with a couple of twats.
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Maybe, although a lot of that could have been dealt with sometime ago by moderator/admin intervention.
Although, having said that I use the reputation system to insult people all the time, but never on someone who hasn't been here for a while.
More generally though, I don't think you could really have avoided the underlying problem we've developed. The new users (with some notable exceptions) who have arrived within the last year or so just don't really gel with the existing forum atmosphere which has developed (for better or worse). You can't put that down to individual users or the rep system generally.
The newer users tend to be younger, use more AOLisms (or type worse), like linking to more videos and tend to be more emotional and less cynical. And so they do things that what remains of the "hardcore" GDers wouldn't tend to do. Like that guy who posted his science fiction short-story recently. I've got a lot of respect for people who are willing to put their creative products online for strangers to comment on (and to be fair, he wasn't
that savaged) but anyone whose been here for a while can see that isn't really the sort of thing that we "do" (yeah, I know there are precedents, but I'm talking generally).
Similarly with people who post threads which are just links to videos (with nothing else). You better make sure the video is damn funny otherwise you
will get neg repped, insulted, people saying "old" and so on. Yet that sort of thing is the lifeblood of other forums.
I don't really know what my point was (as usual) but basically we're a bunch of cantakerous old bastards, and as such we're unlikely to attract a lot of new users. Unless it's other cantakerous old bastards who happen to randomly find our forum out there on the internet (lo DDA!).
Oh yeah and I agree with Nondescript Human. If you did a graph of GD activity over the last six years, I'm not convinced that the introduction of rep would be anything more than a blip in the general downward trend.
Oh how I wish I had SQL access to bore people with.
