Reputation System

[JamesP]

There seems to be occasional confusion and consternation regarding the reputation system on the boards. Here is an overview.

 

One of the things that Stef has talked about on the show is the importance of a good reputation. A good reputation takes a long time to build up, while it can take just one serious mistake to cause that to collapse.

 

When we moved the board to the current software, I decided to enable the reputation system for both positive and negative votes. All donators have the ability to rate posts up or down, to the tune of 5 votes each day.

 

The main motivation behind the reputation system is to take some of the pressure of managing the community off of the admins. As of the time of this writing, we only have 2 active admins, and no moderation staff. Considering that we have a board community of several thousand users, with a hundred or more users active most of the time, that is quite impressive.

 

The community is also made up of some high quality people and is thus quite good at self-policing. The reputation system helps quite a bit with this, as a negative reputation number indicates that it might not be worth engaging with that person.

 

If a user's reputation gets low enough, their posts will be auto-hidden. These posts are easily made visible, but it is a considerable time-saver for many users, who can tell whether a thread is really worth their time.

 

As the reputation system has a mechanism for negative consequences, there are complaints about it. However, there has not been an instance where a negative reputation was not deserved.

 

Another thing I have noticed about these complaints is that they are almost exactly the same complaints that we had prior to this system.

 

Prior to this system, we could either hide posts (which users could not then choose to see), or ban a user outright.

 

We were told that we were unfairly censoring people, that there needed to be more transparency, that we were removing people who did nothing but disagree...

 

Not all people who dislike this system are experiencing direct negative impacts, but the complaints, oh, the complaints... they are the same.

 

They come up with all kinds of theories as to why they are being downvoted. They blame the system, they blame the admins, they believe that they are being targeted by somebody with a vendetta... they say that the system needs to be discarded, that it needs to be changed, it MUST be changed "if you are for freedom"...

 

Sigh.

 

I cannot recall anyone who has made these complaints ever taking a step back and asking themselves if this is a consequence of their actions.

 

I have never seen anyone ask for my reasons or opinions on why this system is in place--at least, not without throwing in some accusations around integrity.

 

All I have seen is a retreading of the same old complaints.

 

It is also worth mentioning that the reputation system makes it much more transparent why a user might be disinvited from the boards. You can easily go back to see the content of their posts, with the added information of just how negatively rated a particular post might have been.

 

All of this tells me that these complaints really have nothing to do with us. After all, they are choosing to make the posts which win them negative votes. Then, they choose to escalate and double down on those behaviors, which after some time wins their posts being hidden.

 

If you find that you are sliding into negative reputation territory, I invite you to take a few steps back from the forum and ask yourself what is going on. This is an opportunity for growth, and one that you may not encounter again.

 

Philosophy is the love of knowledge, and the most essential knowledge is self-knowledge.