The thumbs-up/thumbs-down Reputation system (which I wrote from scratch myself) was designed to give everyone a fair chance, and to produce an accurate Reputation score on a Trad Catholic message board.
That last phrase is important. Trads are very opinionated, and disagreements run deep. It's very easy to make enemies in the Trad world, even if you don't have any enemies "in the world" (at work, school, etc.)
I realize it's a bit cynical, but it's true that Trads fight like cats and dogs.
Knowing Trads as well as I do (I've known them for 3 decades), I designed the system accordingly.
1. A thumbs down only costs 1/3 of a point
2. Any given person can only count for a certain % of the target's thumbs-down total. If he has 100 thumbs-down so far, you can only hope to be 20 of them. If you want to give him another thumbs down, you have to wait for about 5 other people to thumb him down.
It's simple -- the more thumbs-up you receive, the more you CAN receive from each person. Same with thumbs-down.
So not only is it good to give a good post the Thumbs-Up it deserves (for the sake of the 1 point), but it also allows others -- including "cheerleaders" (those who have already maxed out their up-votes to this person) -- to more easily give it a thumbs-up.
If he's truly unpopular, that won't be a problem! But if you alone hate him for some reason, you'll be LIMITED in how much harm you can do to his Rep score.
I think that's a good thing.
There are some Trads that are vindictive, and there are Trads with too much time on their hands. I had to account for all those realities.
I think the system works very, very well as it exists today.
Topic: Too many thumbs down (Read 1193 times)