Quote Originally Posted by Brutus View Post
The other issue I seem to remember was that people were giving negative rep points or positive rep points on whether they agreed with a post and it became more about popularity than rather someone was abiding by the rules and being nice to one another.
Apologies for not covering this in my first response.

Of course you'd rep posts you agree with. I sincerely doubt anyone is going to rep something they disagreed with. "Hey, your logic is faulty, you've ignored important facts and your general philosophy on this issue is 100% wrong ... so here's some rep!" Not going to happen. It was a rep system, not a congeniality recognition system.

If somebody made a persuasive case or had a particularly interesting take or wrote something well, that got rep. Nobody who had a high rep thought they were popular (except Raisor, who knew he was popular), just that people liked various thing they had written/posted. Neg rep was a tiny sliver of the pie.

The upside of the system is that if you posted something you thought was brilliant and it landed like a dud, the zero rep you got for that post would sort of clue you in on that. The biggest problem post-rep, IMO, has been the influx of "nobody cares" posts. Clearly some folks think their personal borefest has some sort of constituency. I can guarantee you that if we had a rep system they'd be disabused of that notion.

I'm hopeful the new system will give rise to more interesting people posting here. The board needs it.