Quote:
Originally Posted by cadandcookies
Real life example: You know those clothespins people pin to each other at competition? I hate them. Specifically I hate it when I'm in a conversation and no less than three separate people pin me. Is it a logical response to get angry at this? Not really. They're just pins. Still, I got worked up about this enough that I actually raised my voice to tell a student to stop it.
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It's nice to know I'm not the only one.
It's interesting to see how a conversation presumably about students on CD is more of a conversation about rep points.
Story time: I had never gotten rep before when Karthik gave me positive rep. For some reason, going from one green dot to four green dots was very satisfying, so I started posting regularly.
Even if "they're just dots," they're a status symbol. Unlike "upvotes" or "likes" or whatever else, the reputation you get is displayed on all of your posts. It's not like Facebook shows you how many "likes" your friends have gotten over the years. So, big green bars are tied to people that other people respect, and people with red bars are shunned. This is good in concept because it makes for an obvious indicator of who is experienced and who is not. The problem is that it also creates a rather toxic environment where every post is defined by the poster, instead of the content of the post itself. It also allows people who are mad at something they read on the internet to make other people sad because of some red and green dots on a screen.
Reputation is so superficial, but so permanent. It still irks me that when you hover over my rep it says "brilliant future" instead of "reputation beyond repute," and if that isn't superficial, I don't know what is. Ideally, people would give reputation based on the quality of a post, but it's natural for people to give negative rep to posts they disagree with. I've been a victim of this, and, although I try not to do it, I'm sure I've given biased rep before, too. I think there's some people on CD who show more restraint than others in what they post and what they give rep to, but the vast majority of people conduct themselves as well as people can.