[jonathan lall]

ChiefDelphi, n. the only place we talk about rep more than we give it out. It's a little silly. Let me offer my view and then (hopefully) split.

More than 50% of Chit-Chat threads are good discussion to a large group of people. Rep exists to ensure a high quality of interaction takes place. It rewards those who are successful at this and penalizes those who are not. An analogy can be made to capitalism; those who are sucessful and work hard will in theory end up with more money (rep) and then a side effect of this would be that they can flaunt this wealth to others to show that they've done their duty (the little green dots appearing on every post that person makes). In both analogous examples, the more green you get, the better.

Ummm... yeah, anyway, it would seem the basis of an argument against rep in Chit-Chat is that rep is some kind of trophy or grand achievement on the forum and that since this a forum that consists chiefly of FIRST competitors, only technical FIRST issues should be rewarded rep. This view sees rep as some kind of indicator of one's technical credibility, when the purpose of rep is to raise the bar, so to speak, of the quality of discussion more than anything. Going back to my analogy, that's like saying... only hot dog vendors should become rich, because everyone else makes their dough in a "lesser" way.

By an extension of this logic it can be argued that rep should not be given out in the ChiefDelphi.com Website forum, because it has nothing to do with FIRST directly. If we want to be really picky, we can even call for outlawing rep in the Mentor forum because it doesn't present a level playing field for everyone. Boo hoo, I say. This is petty. Just because someone else got most of his or her rep in the openFIRST forum for example (which let's say you see as of lesser value than the Technical Discussion Forum), doesn't mean that they don't deserve that rep as compared to your technical posts.

So if rep exists to hold the qualiy of discussion at a high level, the Chit-Chat forum needs rep more than any other forum, and while it does contain a lot of garbage, most threads aren't the Birthday Thread (which I'm guessing is a huge rep-bait hub) or the Trivia section, so most people that get rep from fluffy posts alone won't surpass those who know what they're talking about.

For the record, the only negative rep point I got was due to a difference in opinion in the Chit-Chat forum. I don't really mind, because it's not like something as inconsequential as rep is going to ever bother me. This doesn't seem to be the case with many people. The fact that this misuse of rep has happened to me in Chit-Chat does not make Chit-Chat rep any less needed.