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I think getting no downvotes for an extended period should be recognised, for example:

  • no downvotes for 25 consecutive answers: bronze
  • no downvotes for 80 consecutive answers: silver
  • no downvotes for 200 consecutive answers: gold

It would be a mark of quality of answers, rather than sheer quantity, which is how some make reputation.

Edit

Perhaps to stop a driveby downvote affecting the clean run, it could be "less than 1% of votes are down votes" or similar

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  • 10
    Sounds like a cool badge to have, but if you've made it to 399 consecutive answers without any downvotes and then a drive by downvote spoils it all, it will be harsh.
    – yannis
    Dec 21, 2012 at 3:21
  • 1
    Only 25 to go for your bronze.
    – Chris Gerken
    Dec 21, 2012 at 4:24

2 Answers 2

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17

Bad idea. I think this makes downvotes that much more negative, when we should encourage people to care less about them. Now downvotes can spoil your obtaining a gold badge?

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  • Agreed. Down votes are to say this isn't very useful or may be wrong. Not to tell people "never post again" they are only a reminder for quality not quantity, Plus with the badges they can be turned into more negative "weapons" per say
    – DeadChex
    Dec 21, 2012 at 3:51
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    Exactly. They're not punitive, they're simply meant to sort good content from bad content.
    – user229044
    Dec 21, 2012 at 13:21
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The cynic in me sees it as troll-bait. This would be among the only circumstances I can think of where another user could actively and intentionally hinder your progress. Rep-wise, a serial downvoter can only remove 2 points against 10 per upvote, and as soon as it becomes obvious enough, the audits will catch the behavior.

But it's trivial to look at a reputation history and target at just the right moment and wreck your "clean record" badge.

It sounds fun, but it also reminds me of the disappointments of flag weight - watching that graph go up and up, only to drop way back down. That might actually encourage answerers to delete good answers if they receive a downvote among multiple upvotes (assuming deletion wipes the record), and that affects the whole community & wider Internet in the interest of rescuing a badge for the answerer.

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  • That's not cynicism, it's common sense. The data explorer would even make it easy to look for likely targets (people with long strings of no downvotes historically).
    – McCannot
    Dec 21, 2012 at 20:15

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