On any given day, you can earn a maximum of 200 rep from upvotes. Is there a corresponding cap on reputation you can lose from downvotes? If not, why the distinction?
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1There is a cap; you can never go below 1 reputation point.– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 18:59
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5If your sole reputation change for the day is 100 downvotes, I think the least of your problems is capping it off.– animuson StaffModCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 18:59
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The cap exists to prevent users from gaining privileges too fast without proper site experience. Losing privileges is far less of a problem.– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:00
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3@canon: excess rep-gain is a problem, because you gain additional privileges on the site. We don't want people with 0 experience with the site casting delete votes everywhere, for example.– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:03
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@canon: there is also the 'give the rest of us a chance' aspect; if there was no cap, I'd never have reached position 25 on Stack Overflow in 2.5 years.– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:03
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Beyond 20k, the reputation cap evens out the playing field a little; you need to provide new answers to gain bounties and accepted answer points to get beyond the cap and gain 'rank' on the site. This means that even accounts that hit the cap daily from old posts alone eventually fade away from the top rankings.– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:05
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If you can come up with compelling reasons for why the site would be better off without a daily rep loss cap, then you're more than welcome to propose the feature. As it is there is no compelling reasons for it to exist; features aren't implemented for no reason.– ServyCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:13
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@canon: What is the reasoning behind the reputation cap?– Martijn PietersCommented Dec 2, 2014 at 19:14
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1 Answer
The daily reputation cap exists to prevent users from gaining privileges too fast without proper site experience. Losing privileges is far less of a problem.
Besides, if a user is attracting that many downvotes (and it is not a serial vote by one other user seeking out posts to downvote; these are reverted anyway), we really want to make sure that that user is not going to do too much damage to the site. Capping reputation loss would not benefit the site as a whole in such cases.
answered Dec 2, 2014 at 19:01
