Should negative reputation be discouraged?

Question

I know that the concept of negative reputation doesn't theoretically exist, but in practice, if you look hard enough, you can find users that have negative reputation; it's easier to see this in the reputation graph.

There are a few examples of users with negative rep (one user on meta has -700 rep). The whole purpose of rep is to determine how much the community trusts and values your opinion, but also what rights you gain from it (voting, commenting, editing etc.). Having users with such a low score certainly must have consequences.

Shouldn't there be some sort of action taken for this low, low, low reputation? We can't take any more rights from such users because they're already only allowed to ask questions (at a slower rate than most) and answer questions (also at a slower rate). Taking these rights away will strip away the possibility of ever gaining rep back. However, a short visit in the sin bin might be a better solution.

We've already seen the sin bin used, on various occasions, for different types of infractions: abusive behavior, spamming, offensive names/avatars, gaming the system etc. Having a penalty for low rep that's automatically enforced would make the binning process somewhat more transparent and would deter users from continually trolling the site with no consequences (they clearly don't care about rep, so just downvoting them won't have any effect).

Answer 1

Evan Carroll is a special case. He's not your average troll. He has thousands of points on Stack Overflow. Clearly, he 'gets' the system, and is in fact a valuable contributor. This strengthens the case that he is deliberately trolling Meta, and not just being completely clueless time after time.

I think Evan finds rep on Meta worthless (which in fact it largely is), and has decided to take on the roll of court jester, badgering the more staid members of our community with useless suggestions to which they apparently feel compelled to reply. I think satirising our over-serious, navel-gazing discussions about obscure system behaviours has a certain value.

Personally, I find his posts much more amusing than the 'hilarious' attempts to fit in with boring, overused 'memes'. In fact, his posts make me laugh, and I positively enjoy downvoting Evan's questions and answers.

I say, let the guy carry on. Unlike Rich B, he has no powers on Meta, and he's not aggresive. He doesn't post very often, what he posts is funny, and he's no more off-topic than the endless waffles and ponies.

Answer 2

We don't do "punishment" here, so that's already the wrong word.

I would say we discourage negative behaviors.

I think you're looking at an extreme outlier, the proverbial thousand year storm, so it's not good to make a lot of changes based on that.

Answer 3

It it completely pointless to penalise members with negative reputation, as they are quite capable of just creating a new account and starting out with 0 again - in fact penalising members with negative rep would probably be detrimental, as it would encourage this behaviour and therefore make it more difficult to track who is posting what.

Answer 4

People don't have negative reputation, accounts do. People who persist with an account with very negative rep, rather than starting with a new account, are clearly not deterred by very low reputation.

It's hard to design consequences for such people that will work as intended. Since the actual disruption is so minimal, I say don't bother.

Answer 5

I think that you are approaching this in a wrong way.

The problem is not users with negative rep, as that is merely a consequence of the user's behaviour, which is the real problem.

There are already enough tools to manage this, not the least of them being the moderators. I want to believe that users that repeatedly appear on the flagged posts list are managed by the mods.

Answer 6

I say that after -100 or maybe -300 instead of banning the user (is that what you mean by sin bin?) I say that all actions they take should be more closely moderated. Of course, this requires more moderators but still. This idea is in place for a lot of forums.

Basically, Evan will post a question or answer and right when posted it is deleted. Eventually a diamond mod (or 5 10k mods is it?) can come and undelete it. Of course, this would probably require sending an alert or something to diamond mods or adding a new "moderation list" to the moderator tools so that such things don't get forgotten. But basically if the community thinks it shouldn't be deleted they undelete it. And for the list approach, once the post reached a score of -5 or -10 or something while still being initially deleted, it will be hidden from the moderator's lists and treated like other deleted posts.

I do not think any restraints are necessary on commenting though

Also, of course after a large amount of downvotes even with tighter moderation, like -500 or so, bans are definitely in order