For context: the Disciplined and Peer Pressure badges are awarded for deleting one's own content with a score of 3 or higher or -3 or lower respectively.
Earlier today, someone posted a comment that they would not delete their answer since it had accumulated a score of -3 and would stand to earn the Peer Pressure badge, and they didn't want to be identified with (in their opinion) a "badge of shame". (The answer was later deleted by the community.)
The reason why the badge exists is to entice users to delete their bad-quality content and to provide a consolation prize much like the now-retired Tumbleweed badge used to. But the above scenario got me thinking: maybe retaining that badge isn't the best idea, and perhaps it should be retired. There are three reasons I can come up with:
It publicly identifies users as having posted content that got downvoted
Like all badges, Peer Pressure will show in the user's public badge logs, and so if a user posts a downvoted post that they delete, that fact will be publicly indicated on their profile. Some users may object to this and avoid deleting their own post, just like in the above case, in which case the badge fails to accomplish its intended purpose.
Also, here on Meta, as downvoting may simply indicate disagreement, it publicly marks users who made a disagreed post that wasn't necessarily of low quality the same way that it marks a user who posted low-quality, self-deleted content on a main site.
Deleting one's own negatively-received post is discouraged by the post ban algorithms
As I said earlier, the point of the Peer Pressure badge is to get users to delete their negatively-received content. However, the post ban algorithms explicitly disincentivize this, and favor users editing to improve such content: such posts' downvotes still count toward them if deleted, and the fact that they're deleted can also count against them. It's contradictory to have an incentive toward deleting negatively-received content while having a much stronger incentive toward not deleting it and fixing it instead.
It encourages gaming the system or making troll posts
There have been documented cases in the past where a user games the Peer Pressure badge by intentionally making a low-quality post, waiting for it to get downvoted, then deleting it. This is definitely not behavior we want to encourage.
Based on these three reasons, I think it's a good idea to retire the badge, especially for questions, due to the second reason. There may be some value in retaining it for answers, and I do see that it can be used to assist others in moderating content by allowing users to see if one's posted negatively-received content in the past that they self-deleted, but I did ask around in the largest content quality moderation chat room on the network and it doesn't really seem to be used there. Plus, it ignores community- and moderator-deleted posts.
I think that a discussion of this badge would be incomplete without also discussing the closely-related Disciplined badge. Per my second link above, the purpose of this badge is to entice users to delete wrong answers that received upvotes. This badge definitely entices users to delete good-quality content that others have indicated is useful, which is definitely harmful to the site. Plus, disregarding that, the only rationale I've seen is for answers, but the badge is awarded for questions too: I don't see much value in that, since such questions are likely to get answered and we don't want users to delete questions that have been answered.
There may be something of value that I missed in one or both of these badges, so I'd like to open this as a discussion: what should be done with these badges? Should the Peer Pressure badge be restricted to only answers or retired entirely? What about the Disciplined badge?
