Thread: Neg Reps
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Unread 14 Jan 2007, 08:56   #85
JonnyBGood
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JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.JonnyBGood has ascended to a higher existance and no longer needs rep points to prove the size of his e-penis.
Re: Neg Reps

The enabling of reputation on this forum has been an interesting enough social experiment in terms of internet communities. How should reputation work and how does it really work in reality. I think, in general, we'd all like reputation to be a perfect barometer of how good a poster you actually are. However there are, obviously, problems with this. For one we all have different ideas of what makes up a good poster. I seem to encounter people who think posting pleasant banalities at a rate of knots is somehow beneficial to a forum. On the other hand I personally view the existence of people who post two word compliments in any thread as an offense so vile it's sufficient proof for the existence of the devil.

Equally we rarely want to admit we're actually not good at posting on the internet. A lot of people when they get neg-repped seem to have this bizzare desire to let the entire world know they've been neg-repped and it a) doesn't bother them b) is unjustified or c) proves their point from earlier. Trust me, all it proves is that someone disagreed with your initial post and maybe you should briefly reflect, aided hopefully by the helpful comment left, as to why this post may have been of poor quality. If we do admit to making poor posts it's usually closely followed by "if ur gd at posting on the internet it means u have no life lol" or some variant of the above. The idea here being that by belittling something being inexcusably rubbish at it becomes, well, excusable. It's a rare man who will type out something, read back over it and correct it hoping to make it a better post instead of just mashing their face into the keyboard and praying the post submits. That's sort of why reputation might never work.

How we hope reputation works is that people get positive repped for good posts they make and are therefore more likely to repeat posts involving the same techniques of internet posting again. Conversely if people make bad posts they get neg-repped and are therefore likely to think about where they went wrong and how they can correct this in future. Eventually this leads to a community of brilliant posters who possess such dazzling charm, wit and command of the english language that even the sun god himself wears tinted shades when looking straight at the forum. There is no intrinsic reason why the above doesn't work and to a certain extent it probably has worked slightly along those lines. Most of the people I recognise as good posters have fairly high rep, whether they've actually achieved this due to being positive repped for good posts is a different issue.

Since the reputation system was introduced I've seen some very clear, and fairly disheartening examples of circle-jerk repping. By now, I think, most of this has stopped, hopefully due to some sort of internet cull of stupid people. I mean, you don't have to take the internet seriously or anything but if you want to make a big joke out of it at least try to make it funny. Or absurd. Or some adjectivised combination of the aforementioned. I think positive rep certainly has served to increase the amount of goodwill on the forums. Personally I like to throw a little party each time I get pos-repped. Neg-repping has increased the amount of illwill on the forums and unfortunately with anonymous repping this illwill becomes slightly unfocused and instead of that appalling pm you receive on irc from someone who disagreed with some utterly insignificant point in a post you can barely remember making now we get people spewing their tripe (delightful image I thought) all over threads people are actually desperately struggling through in the vain goal of finding a post that doesn't make them wish Al Gore had just really not been arsed that day he invented the internet as a replacement for morse code.

The idea that rep is valueless is missing the point. Reputation is designed to be there to help people think and to offer a gentle pat on the ass to people who do well while offering a firm dick up the ass to people who don't do so well. The second thing is relevant only because people act differently based on it for some god unknown reason and the first is obviously a personal reaction thing. Reputation is a tool which people are free to use and act on in any way they wish to. If you want to stay up at night and worry about your last neg rep because you're a whiny neurotic feel free to do so. If you want don't even want to read it, don't bother looking at your user CP. Just for the love of god don't start another thread about it
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