gbaz69: I'm so trying to not care about rep...
but in my view, a down rep = "did I do something wrong?" feeling... and I don't want to feel like that, nor do I want to feel like I upset someone.
My constant -5 rep daily off and on; has me worried I'm doing something very wrong.. inline with being banned from gog even.
Or it is a specific person, and I wish they just pm me and we can clear up any missunderstandings or missgivings.
I understand gog wanting the user names to be anonymous... but I at least want to know which of my posts are getting down repped (low rating only shows up ... for what... 5+ down reps?).
That way I can figure out exactly what I need to fix to stop all this downrepping.... because my wordsmith is awful and I'm not always clear on my thoughts, and sometimes people draw the wrong conclusions from my strait forward posts.
I've seen people post things that were entirely and completely positive and be downrepped for it where there was no possible way that someone could have been offended and it is obvious that someone had a vendetta or they were just gaming the system for personal enjoyment hoping it irritated the target. If one is simply being genuine then it is normal for people to agree with one's viewpoint at times and to disagree at other times, to feel good about something someone says or to feel bad about it - regardless of the poster's actual intentions, and worrying about being downrepped regardless of the reason why just plays into it and gives the rep points meaning. It's well known that the rep system is tremendously weak, has practically no value and is easily gamed by bots/scripts or people who diligently downrep someone's posts every time they see them post just because they don't like the person or know the person gets irked by it.
So people end up making assumptions into why and that's where things go sour because there is no way to know why, and "for completely irrational reasons" very well could be and probably are the correct answer unfortunately. So I believe that any amount of mental energy expended as concern/worry/care towards the rep points only stand to make one's enjoyment of the socialization experience diminished from what it could be. Personally I'd be in favour of GOG getting rid of the rep system entirely or just hiding the score so it isn't visible at all.
I've seen people with 4 digit rep scores or high 3-digit scores who rarely seem to post, pop in and act very hostile towards someone or do something which a person with a score of 5 would get downrepped to -50 for in minutes, but the person with the high score either does not get downrepped for it, or they do and don't care because it'd take 3 months for people to collectively downrep them to some score that has any relevance on anything and even then it's just basically a small number of giveaways (they probably don't even care about) and the antispam system. So the rep system is pretty much ineffective at representing someone's actual reputation, ineffective at deterring disruptive types of behaviours, and only stands IMHO to divide people instead of bring them together.
There are better ways to manage the various things the rep points system is in place for which would work better, and would not cause people to feel alienated or bullied IMHO.
When people can just randomly downrep someone even without having any reason to do so, it's a waste of time to worry about why IMHO. People should just be themselves, try to be respectful and polite as much as possible and not be worried about everyone not agreeing with their views 100% or liking every single thing they might share or comment about.
Honestly, if I worried about saying something that someone might disagree with me about and downrep me, I'd probably never speak. If people feel they gain power of some sort by downrepping someone they dislike or disagree with, it's an illusion, but if they need to do that to feel good or get a charge out of it, I say whatever floats their boat. :)
Hopefully GOG will trash the rep system and replace it with better solutions to the problems the rep system was intended to fix.