The Repping System

[Vertical Gunn]

Does positive and negative repping effect your MoFo account at all? Just needing to know. Thanks.

[Lucifer Prometheus]

Did you just get over 9000 neg reps for all those random news threads?:p

[Powdered Water]

You're probably going to need to refine your question a bit before you're going to get a coherent answer. I don't really feel like playing twenty questions with you so I'll just give you what I know. I don't believe that the rep system is designed to affect your account in any way. It's simply a perk (and a good one at that) that enhances your enjoyment of the site.

[Lucifer Prometheus]

Also a form of popular social control.

[Powdered Water]

If you say so. I'm not that smart.

[Lucifer Prometheus]

Basically, it serves as both negative and positive reinforcement administered by the forum community. It encourages members to behave in a way that will please other members. It curbs 'bad' behavior and encourages 'good' behavior. It seriously cuts down on flame wars and keeps the need for mod intervention to a minimum.

Generally, only dedicated trolls will need to be handled by moderators under a system like this.
It is IMHO a decidedly Anarchist system of social control.

[Sinny McGuffins]

Whoa, man. You just blew my ****ing mind.

[Sir Toose]

Basically, it serves as both negative and positive reinforcement administered by the forum community. It encourages members to behave in a way that will please other members. It curbs 'bad' behavior and encourages 'good' behavior. It seriously cuts down on flame wars and keeps the need for mod intervention to a minimum.

Generally, only dedicated trolls will need to be handled by moderators under a system like this.
It is IMHO a decidedly Anarchist system of social control.

What if we (the mod team) just decide to ignore the + or - rep of any given user?

Sorta blows your theory eh?

I ignore that stuff competely, FYI.

[Yoda]

Technically speaking, there's no tangible benefit or detriment to having very high or very low levels of rep. It does not change your basic abilities on the site.

The idea behind it is twofold; as LP suggests, it can vaguely influence posters to behave. As Toose correctly points out, this is tenuous and only works as much as a given member cares about it, so its influence varies.

Mainly, however, it's just a way of letting people express their thoughts in another form. Members often want to express agreement (or disagreement) without jumping into a thread completely. It cuts down on the number of short, relatively unnecessary posts that would say something like "I agree" or "yeah!," which are really only completely relevant to one person. As a result, a larger percentage of posts are interesting and insightful to a larger percentage of people. This is the theory, at least -- the actual result is hard to quantify, but I think, on net, it succeeds.

And, of course, there are the green or red dots underneath each user's username, which is the visible manifestation of it all. There are a few threads on this and related topics in this forum.

All this said, I've thought for quite a long time about having rep play a larger role in the community. For example, automatically removing threads or posts that receive a certain number of negative rep points in quick succession, something which only ever happens with spam or vulgarity. More likely to happen, and perhaps sooner, would be particularly high-rep posts being highlighted somehow.

There's an unbelievable number of possible applications here, though I've held off on almost all of them until more rep is given and taken on a daily basis. It does seem to be increasing over the long term, though, so it's probably only a matter of time. :)

[Powdered Water]

Yeah!

[Lucifer Prometheus]

What if we (the mod team) just decide to ignore the + or - rep of any given user?

Sorta blows your theory eh?
No, not really. The crux of my theory is that this is a form of social control that is exercised by the community as a whole; the mod team only comes into play when the rep system fails.
The rep system plays both on our cultural desire to archive a "high score" whenever scores are given out and our social desire for peer approval.

This does not influence all users equally; it might not influence some users at all; but if you find yourself checking your rep at least once every week or so, it may be influencing you more than you think.

[Godoggo]

Basically, it serves as both negative and positive reinforcement administered by the forum community. It encourages members to behave in a way that will please other members. It curbs 'bad' behavior and encourages 'good' behavior. .

I am going to split hairs here, but wouldn't a negative rep in this case be positive punishment not negative reinforcement? As I understand it positive punishment is something added to a behavior to make it decrease where negative reinforcement is something that you take a way to make a behavior less likely to occur.

Just making sure I have those terms clear in my head. ;)

I do agree with you that probably does occur with the rep system for a lot of the people.

[Lucifer Prometheus]

http://deadon.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/chalmers.jpg
SKINNER!

Yeah, I could never keep negative reinforcement and punishment straight. Now that I think about it, negative reinforcement involves the removal of an existing negative condition when the desired behavior comes up. Like the mouse that's put in a mildly electrified cage that only stops shocking the poor thing for a few minutes every time it pushes a lever.

Negative reinforcement does arguably have it's place in this paradigm. It really depends on what a given member's default behavior tends to be.

This brings up a point of concern:
such a system of popular social control could well tend to stifle unpopular opinions. Thus I try not to neg rep any posts simply because I disagree with their content. Of course, I do not think that the reputation system is a powerful enough stimulus for most people to cause this kind of self censorship. I hope not anyway.

[TONGO]

Yoda you should post the top ten highest & lowest reps on the site somewhere. That would be fun to read

[Tacitus]

Yoda you should post the top ten highest & lowest reps on the site somewhere. That would be fun to read

Click 'post ratings' in the quick links drop-down menu. Up there ^^^^ ;)

[TONGO]

Thank you Tacitus, and a thums up I give to you. :) Imo it does help post quality overall in a forum

[Yoda]

This brings up a point of concern:
such a system of popular social control could well tend to stifle unpopular opinions. Thus I try not to neg rep any posts simply because I disagree with their content. Of course, I do not think that the reputation system is a powerful enough stimulus for most people to cause this kind of self censorship. I hope not anyway.
This is true. While people are free to give negative rep for disagreement, I do tend to discourage it whenever people ask me how the system should be used. Personally, I use it when I think someone is being rude, irrational, or especially uninsightful. But yes, people deciding to use it for simply agreement or disagreement, regardless of post quality, is a concern at times. Thankfully this doesn't seem to have become a big problem -- the highest ranked posts still tend to be reviews and installments of people's Top 100 lists.

And posts in the Quote of the Day thread. A day of reckoning is coming there, methinks. ;)