Just for another perspective on why complaining about rep here (or anywhere else) won’t get you very far …
I didn’t set a whole lot of guidelines on the reputation system. This was a deliberate choice, not purely an act of laziness. A lot of people are talking like it’s something bigger and more important than it is, but it’s not. I think maybe I didn’t explain it quite as unambiguously enough before, so I’ll try to fill in the underlying thought process here.
First of all, here’s the description I gave it, back on page 1, post 1 of this thread:
And the guidelines I set out:Basically, the reputation system is a community-driven user rating system. So if you think a user is a really awesome poster, you would give them a positive reputation hit, or if you think they're the worst thing to happen to the forums, you'd give them a negative rep hit.
You might notice that these are remarkably scant. You might also notice that I used the term “you think”. I didn’t really specify the mechanics of the system … what you could or couldn’t rep, any detailed guidelines about that. Let me re-emphasize: if you think a user is [an] awesome poster, you would give them a positive reputation hit, or if you think they're [bad], you'd give them a negative rep hit. You may notice, I leave the door open to pretty much whatever mechanics you want to apply to it. You can give people negative rep because you don't like them, or because you don't agree with them, or because you think they're just bad posters who're hurting the community, or because they posted a three-page long philosophical explanation of the rep system that was too long for you to bother reading, or because you had a bad day and think that taking it out by handing out two dozen negative reps to the last 4 posters per thread in the last 6 threads that have been posted in is going to somehow feng-shui the negative energies into a spiral that diverts them away from your living-space. Whatever. The door's open, feel free. Similarly, you can positive-rep people because they made a particularly insightful or interesting post, or because they made you laugh, or because they posted three pages worth of philosophical explanation about the rep system that made you think, or because you spent 10 minutes watching squirrels in the park and are in a particularly good mood and handing out joy to whoever comes your way. And it doesn't matter.Try to give out more positive reputation hits than negative ones.
No soliciting rep hits.
Don't take it too seriously.
Leave comments with your rep hits.
There’s a rule enforcement system in place, and that system is the moderators. We don’t need a community feedback system for that (though we do appreciate good uses of the “report bad post” button), and the rules themselves are NOT a court of popular opinion. Quite the opposite, they’re the very definition of autocracy: the rules come from above, and they’re pretty much unchangeable by “the masses” (though we're open to suggestions). If you find the rules onerous, and you can't abide by them, your only recourse is to leave (and ... well ... the mods will help you there, if you really can't abide by them).
Reputation is NOT a rule enforcement system. It has no real consequences. No matter how negative someone’s reputation gets, they won’t lose the ability to be a community member – albeit perhaps a widely reviled one. Nobody’s getting banned for having a bad rep – though people with particularly bad rep (worse than anyone’s legitimately accumulated so far) will drop below the threshold where they’re allowed to participate in the reputation system (essentially a disenfranchisement of people convicted of the crime of bad taste).
So what is the rep system? Like I said, it’s a community driven rating system. Nothing more, nothing less.
I think this can be a useful tool, in that it can be used to give feedback to people who maybe aren’t the best posters, but aren’t breaking any rules by making bad posts. Or to give good posters some encouragement to keep posting good material. It gives the near-silent lurkers a way to express their voice when they don’t have anything to say that they think would be worthy of making a post over. It gives everyone a way to visually judge what the average sentiment toward a given user looks like.
So why don’t I care that people are using it to express disagreement, or other stupid reasons? Well, mainly the realization that I’m asking you to make a value judgement. That’s inherent in what we’re doing here … basically, I’m asking you to express your voice on whether you think any given post is good or bad, and preferably with a reason why. I leave this subjective determination entirely up to you, rather than claiming it for myself. What you think may be a great, thoughtful idea, other people may think is stupid and trivial and pointless. And that's fine... and if people are participating actively, whatever the most popular opinion is will probably win.
When you start quibbling over whether you deserve a given rep hit, you’re asking me to take away the voice of whoever you disagree with. This is inherently an unfair request. You’re asking me to take away someone else’s voice, because you value your own higher. And you know, I can understand valuing your own opinion more than other people’s… heck, I’m the same way. I like me much more than I like you! But that doesn’t mean my voice is inherently more valid than yours (in fact, because of my position relative to the community at large, I’ve pinned my own power level at a value that is slightly less than half of what I’d have if I were just a regular forumgoer – largely as an expression that I shouldn’t be the loudest voice, or even a particularly loud one).
By invalidating feedback that people have given – I'd be turning it from community-driven to system predicated on my own approval. If I do that, it’s no longer your system, no longer your community, and no longer a system for you guys to use – it would become another “user notes” … something for me and maybe the mods to look at, and for you guys not to even realize exists.
And you know, there’s nothing stopping me from doing that, beyond my own sense of accountability to the system and the community – even in this, democracy is merely a courtesy of the dictators. But if I did that, it would defeat the purpose of the system as a whole, and I may as well just go and set people’s reputations to whatever I feel like they should be, and tune the rep powers so that nobody’s hits count, and leave it at that. Since either way it’d only be my opinion that matters, ultimately.
I’d rather not make it into that. I’d rather it not be “complich8 likes the following people” … because while I admittedly have a reasonably high opinion of myself, I don’t think anyone else would really care very much about it – and I really don’t need to turn the forums into an altar for my own ego, you know?
So why did I put forth any guidelines at all? Well, my whole purpose for this experiment is to give you guys, the regular community members, some tool to make you feel like you have a voice, like you’re part of an actual community, rather than just some random websurfer. I want people to get more enjoyment than displeasure out of it (hence, encouraging people to try to give more positive than negative rep). I want to keep the system from detracting from the rest of forum life (hence, “no soliciting rep hits”) – because the last thing the community needs is to become some little closed group of people who’re spamming around trying to get rep and doing nothing else. There is some legitimately good discussion that goes on here, and a legitimately active community, and I think allowing open rep-whoring would degrade that – which isn’t to say that you can’t consciously do things you think will get you good rep, just that you can’t sit there and beg for it. I also want you guys to take into account that this is not a big deal. There seriously are NO negative consequences for having any particular rep score, and only a very tiny incentive to work your way up to an almost unattainably positive one! This is an arbitrary little game, powered by the community, and there are going to be people who just try to shit on everything (cue “dicks, pussies and assholes” speech from Team America: World Police). It’s inevitable, in any reasonably large and reasonably open community, that we’re going to get some people who will do whatever they can to sabotage things, make people miserable, etc. And by complaining about it, by taking offense, you give those people validation, encouragement to keep shitting on things, because it hurts you somehow.
Now, what I've said, and what I’ll continue do to get people to quit bitching a bit, is look into it when people think they’ve been repped unfairly. And every request I’ve gotten about it, I’ve looked into. There's really not a lot of it. And you know, if you honestly feel something’s unfair, then that’s fine, I welcome your message, and I'll look into it -- at very least to be able to explain what's going on (ie: why it's in your head, or that there's actually six people conspiring against you, not the three you thought). But I’m not going to mute people and neuter the system because of anyone’s hurt feelings – not even my own.
Another way to answer this would be to say that discussion is useless if we're all on the same side. Reputation is a form of discussion. Dissenting opinions will express themselves, and if we supress that (by saying "you can't neg rep me for that") we'll end up with the long gray Kraco describes much faster than if we encourage that vigor in all its forms.
Originally Posted by Assassin
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