Back! Back! Back into the cage!!
And that goes double for you.
Listen, you guys are missing the point.
It does not matter if you call it IRC chat, forum, social site, etc... The purpose of all of these is the same. It is to facilitate communication for a group of people. The communication can happen real-time like chat or it can happen in a history format like a blog where people can post comments, forum. Or it can do both real-time and historic like FB.
These are online community tools designed to facilitate communication. If someone wants to join in the discussion reputation is not a factor. Why is it that only some online forums have reputation features? Because the morons who programmed the original forum tools thought it would be "cool" to add a reputation feature. Were they right for doing it? No, no they were not. It is way out of line with real life forums and all other online community communication platforms. It was a bad idea for the programmers to create "rep" on the original forum tools that everyone has copied. But hey, programmers always design programs with perfect features that should never be thrown out. Every concept they added to the original program must remain. Right?
Last I checked when I went to college, a real-life forum did not put signs on the participants that had green bars and read "This guy makes the coolest comments". A real-life forum in radio, TV, discussion group format does not have green bars on any of the participants. Why? Because it is called predisposition. All who participate in the forum can comment and not have their comment "discredited" by a negative rep bar before they even begin to speak.
Community building, healthy debate. Rep only works against that. It causes predispositions.




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