hotShot, on 2010-December-17, 05:01, said:
If we vote up all posts we agree with, the reputation is a measure of popularity and not a measure of quality.
Lol, never been on a forum with rep before eh?! Obv it's just a popularity thing. This is especially true with + votes and not negative votes. A bigger deterrent of bad posts is getting negged all the time, this is much bigger than not getting +++ sometimes.
I mean, right now there's not even a way to see which of your posts got positive rep, so you pretty much never know which kinds of posts people thought were good unless you happen to look at the thread again. That is clearly bad, and just makes it more of a popularity contest rather than a positive reinforcement system.
Also, you cannot see who has given you rep. This isn't that big of a problem with only positive rep available, but if negative rep was here it would be an absolute must. You might think anon rep is better for negs, but all that happens is that people are free to spite neg to their hearts desire (especially certain people with like 10 accounts!). If it was not anonymous, people would be risking getting negged back, so they'd have to have a reason to neg. If they got spite negged back it might create a war (and revenge neg should be against the rules) which led to mutual destruction, so the optimal play is to suck it up and take your neg and not retaliate (and perhaps stop doing whatever it is that got you negged in the first place if you care about rep that much). I have seen this exact system happen many times in practice.
Another thing that good forums that implement rep have is a system where people with low rep who + or - someone count affect your rep much less than people with high rep. This is mainly so that new posters/multi accouters cannot influence your rep that much. Even with non anon rep if there were neg rep equal for everyone, people could spite vote you on pseudonyms etc. At the very least there should be like a 200 post min before you can rep people imo.
I guess this is why BBO has chosen not to implement negative rep at all, but that goes back to my initial point that the system is pretty dumb...which really goes back to who cares? As someone told me recently, the system cannot be that broken because gnasher has the most rep points AFAIK!