yyahoo: I'm sorry. Let me rephrase. GOG does not care about rep, because it does not mean anything. It's a popularity contest. I just don't see the "harassment" angle. I've seen plenty of harassing and offensive talk that's been downrepped. Oh, but that's only harassing and offensive to my eyes. I'm sure the users that posted them just wanted to "speak their mind." That's the problem here. All this stuff you're talking about is subject to each individual's interpretation. Heck, I'm sure there are some that would call "downrepping" "speaking their mind", so you're actually attempting to do what you claim to be defending.
Let's see if I can make this clearer (he says, and then rewrites this post about 5 times).
tinyE (for example) is losing rep. There are two reasons why this could occur.
Firstly, he could be losing that rep incidentally. Perhaps a lot of his recent posts have had downratable content so as people downrate those downrate-worthy posts, he loses rep.
Secondly, he could be losing rep because someone (or some people) are trawling through his old posts and downrating all of them, regardless of their content.
The former is what you call "the popularity contest" and is acceptable because the post rating system is being used as intended. Those posts would have been downrated
regardless of who posted them.
The latter is an abuse of the post rating system intended to reduce his rep.
When it goes from "it just happens to be tinyE making the downrated posts" to "we downrate these posts because they were made by tinyE".. it becomes harassment.