yyahoo: tinyE is the best example of rep downvoting "harassment" because he frequently deserves it and asks for it??
xyem: His posts may deserve to be downrated, but he does not deserve, let alone frequently deserve, to be subject of harassment via downrating. At least not that I've seen. If you can direct me to where he has harassed someone or been malicious though, I might just change my mind.
yyahoo: It can't just be one user going around downvoting a user to cause them to lose rep.
xyem: Yes it can. It is called "having more than one account".
yyahoo: You exaggerate greatly. One person couldn't cause someone with 200+ rep to go down into the negatives. If tinyE is a good example of anything, that's it.
xyem: I am not exaggerating at all,
it has been done before. The changes that GOG made since then just raised the bar to do it above the average forum-goer and made the process slower for someone like myself.
And, you know, see above. From the perspective of the problem area, 1 person with 100 accounts == 100 people.
tinyE is not a good example of this because his low-ratings get undone by people upvoting. If 2 people are making his posts low-rated, it only takes 1 to make it neutral again. If I intended on harassing him this way, the system I created would adjust as required to keep them low-rated.
Trust me, I've clearly put more thought into how to mount such an offensive seeing as you didn't even figure out that someone could
just make more than one account.
yyahoo: The users here on the forum decided to use rep as a requisite for contests etc. Obviously, it's a poor choice. Join date would be a much better stat to use. If someone is going to scam the people in this forum, they aren't going to join, wait 6 months and then join a contest to have a 1 in 100 chance to win a game or to try and rip off someone in a trade. Most of the scammers are new users who never had the time to build up any rep in the first place. Honestly, if there's a misuse of rep, it's in using it to determine trade partners. If someone really wants to scam you, they'll join, make 1 inoffensive post a day for a month or so, and then rip someone off easy. Using your member of choice, tinyE has never gotten so low that he would have been excluded from a contest or subjected to negative treatment in a trade.
xyem: Because tinyE gained enough rep (possibly just due to people countering the downrating.. the system may be biased towards favouring upreps..) to be able to sustain such a
manual attack. See above for why you're reasoning is wrong.
EDIT: Oh, and it is entirely possible that he countered it by making multiple accounts and uprated his posts from them. Again, it has been done before!
yyahoo: Again, it's not my understanding that one user can successfully "harass" and affect someone's rep. Freedom to speak your mind and state offensive or controversial things is offset by other users being able to reply and/or downvote said user. It's part of the balancing of the system.
xyem: See above for how you reasoning and thus conclusion are wrong.
yyahoo: I'm curious though, is there anyone out there that is being "harassed" that has been affected so much that they have not been able to join contests or trade games? The most extreme example that I've seen in the past few months people have been complaining about this happening has been tinyE, and he is still in the 170s.
xyem: No-one that we know of, but that doesn't mean there hasn't been. They may have joined the forum, said that they liked Steam and seeing their rep plummet from the harassment, thought "screw this community" and left without saying anything.
Beware of Survivor Bias! Meh, I'm just not one for conspiracy theories. Occam's razor and all...
Oh well, I'm out.