... is a right bad idea. Don't ever do it. Seriously.

And a +1 to you as well!

Every morning I check my rep and if it went up my dick follows suit.

And it'll only get worse if the Singularity happens and the Internet is the real world.

yay even a psychopath can have reps and people actually listen to him and take his idealism

I don't pay attention to rep metrics. I judge a person's "reputation" by the quality of what they write, not how many green dots they gather.

And that's about as frightening a future as they come.

Also agreed.

I have the impression of my rep going down more in context of contentious opinions put forward; which I think is wrong as long as the reasoning is somehow substantiated and polite, as opposed to behaving rude towards fellow posters.

Hence my impression is that rep is more about posting "pass though the censorship of the medium opinion" - than about including, pulling in, treating encouragingly your fellows in these fora, while freely posting one's own opinions.

I personally put individual courtesy observed before the formal "rep" - the definition of which remains fuzzy to me.

Totally agree with this.

I'm just going to give up writing, because people always say what I mean more eloquently than what I plan on writing. x3

ALL OF YOU SHUT UP AND STOP SAYING STUFF!

;)

Rep is only useful to see how long a person has been around and if they've interacted with the community during that time.

I've been here since almost the beginning, yet have a rep in the 400's - I don't care, but some people might.

In terms of taking stuff on the internet seriously, it's a fine line just like in the Real World. There are certain things you must take seriously, as you ARE directly (or indirectly if you prefer) interacting with other human beings.

The internet is not filled with AI. Part of the problem with technology is the usage of it. Over the last 8 years I have seen an increasing pace of degradation here in the US in terms of literacy and proper use of words. My pet peeve is when people whose primary language is American English type like they're in third grade.

I even had a friend tell me that one of his profs let a classmate use texting lingo in a paper and didn't even mark any of the words as misspelled.

My fear isn't in taking the internet seriously or not seriously, it's in the degradation of American intelligence (feel free to laugh now, Europeans and rest of the world ;) ) to the point where we become a third world country because of our reliance on technology.

A case in point: a follower on Twitter of a famous American football player I follow got retweeted by the football player saying something along these lines: "my phone keeps changing the words I'm typing" and he was PISSED. Apparently he thought the phone (which has an auto-correct feature) was deliberately misspelling his words.

What you have nowadays is an increased userbase of the internet, and with an increased userbase comes a lower bottom line. The sad thing is when you try to teach someone that the word "rouge" means makeup and not a deadly assassin, they seem willing and able to purposely misspell the word at every opportunity because you're not going to tell them what's right and wrong.

There has been a serious degradation of American intelligence over the past 8 years or so, and it's only getting worse. Pray for the internet.

Also, true story, when I was a guild leader in WoW I used to get made fun of for misspelling words that I spelled correctly.

EDIT: Sorry for derailing, I didn't mean to, but I started typing and all this stuff spewed out.

A flame bait thread - hmm... am I missing these in these fora by naiveté? Lest my personally most traumatic, and might I add, OP'ed thread about The Witcher 2 anti-gay themes be considered one of those.

I was very cold and bothered about the tones of some of these replies. And I don't think my rep went up either.

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I agree - I would like to take it serioiusly. Also if I were single again (getting married next year) I'd be hanging by threads around net communication attempting to find prospects but the problem is that's a grande masquerade and so many people can be hiding behind these avatars.

ie; I got very lucky that the girl I met online and swooned for a year really did turn out to be a girl in the end. XD
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That's the other thing is that rep is often just in disagreement with our philosophies or politics rather than just the polite (or not polite) manner in which we hold ourselves.