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Originally Posted by Paul Copioli
I forgot how wise Mr. Baker really is. I, too have noticed this trend. You so called CD veterans: take a good look at how you give out rep. I say that if you have given negative rep to more than 5 people, then you may be a bit judgmental. If you have given negative rep to more than 10 people or a total of more than 20 times, then I say you need to look inward and stop being holier than thou.
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I absolutely agree with Andy and Paul with regard to some of the "rep-bombing" of newbies that has been occurring. But my engineer's instincts kick in at some point, and I would like to suggest a minor modification to Paul's heuristics (the philosophical heart of which are right on target). Rather than holding to a hard and fast number, I would suggest that you might consider an upper-bound on the ratio of negative/positive rep that is given out. If you have given ten negative rep hits out of a total of twenty reputation allocations, then perhaps some adjustment of your understanding of the purpose of reputation points might be in order. Conversely, if you have issued ten negative rep hits out of 1000, then that is probably within a range that most would consider acceptable (let's face it, every now and then there are posts that really do deserve negative rep - ones threatening the life of the President [even if you don't respect the man, respect the office] and ones promoting intentional group violence on an opposing team as retribution are examples that come to mind).
We can quibble over the specific number of the ratio (what is OK? 1%? 4%? 0.5%? I don't know). Everyone may have a different view of what is a reasonable negative/positive ratio. But in the end, each time you consider issuing a negative (or for that matter, positive) reputation hit you must be comfortable with your own answers to three questions:
- Given the roles of both the poster and myself (as student, mentor, parent, teacher, team member, engineer, or whatever), is changing the reputation of the poster an appropriate response to their post?
- If all the reputation allocations were made public, and not kept private, would I still be comfortable in making this reputation allocation?
- If I had made this post and then recieved a negative reputation hit for it, would I feel it was deserved?
Unless you can answer "yes" to each of those questions, then you might want to think a little more about other ways to get your message across to the poster before you hit the "add to reputation" button.
-dave