Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There's so much negativity and sarcasm on many threads that it turns me off and I go elsewhere!
Some people have nothing nice to say so they get attention from being a jerk.
I think if you bring it back it will deter some people from being wiseguys.
Highly unlikely. I'd recommend that you do the following:
Report nasty, trolling or attacking posts - the BEST way to deal with someone who's being a jerk, and far more effective than negative rep.
Put intransigent jerks on your "Ignore" list. You won't see their posts unless you choose to, or unless someone else quotes them.
Explore some of the other forums on City-Data. There are certainly some forums and sub-forums that tend to attract a disputatious crowd, but there are also forums where the regulars go out of their way to be friendly, supportive and helpful to each other. A lot of long-time forum members prefer to spend most of their time here in the friendly areas, avoiding the categories that tend to draw people who love to argue.
There's so much negativity and sarcasm on many threads that it turns me off and I go elsewhere!
Some people have nothing nice to say so they get attention from being a jerk.
I think if you bring it back it will deter some people from being wiseguys.
What do ya think?
Good idea in theory, but in reality, when they tried it what happened was it encouraged the jerks. Those who were getting their kicks from writing jerky posts had a field day playing jerky games with the negative rep points.
There are some threads that do drift off topic or unleash some folks less pleasant side and of course there are some folks that have a agenda that is not conducive to the forums. Generally the moderators do get around to addressing those things, sometimes they get overwhelmed with the volume of posts that need to be tended to...
The positive rep points are abused by some folks too. Sometimes I wish there were a way to tie in the "show members history" display along with the positive rep points so newer members might be able to more quickly assess which members get thanked / lauded for 'content rich' posts and which tend to use the rep points as a sort of happy game of collecting smiles...
I know that there are other sites that use similar software that do enable some features to help assess helpful / unhelpful comments however there is a potential for abuse in those schemes as well as potential for even more load on the db and performance problems.
All in all the value of good moderators cannot be stressed! (sadly there are not enough people to do this and occasionally the folks that are not good at helping the forums can create bigger headaches for the supermods...)
See? Lol! I guess we should just be happy with what we have!
I think that the emoticons - & , get the negativity across adequately when one wishes to convey their disapproval.
Back when I was a mod, I might have been the only member of the mod team who liked the idea of negative rep points.
I joined City-Data when negative rep was turned on, but didn't join the mod team until after it was turned off. The purpose of positive rep is to highlight good posts and signal to the member who made them that you'd like to see more posts like that. I handed out negative rep occasionally to point out posts that I did not want to see more of. In most cases, it didn't make those members change their behavior, it just made them mad.
When I became a mod, I was told that the feature created a lot of extra work for the mods, as members who received negative rep frequently complained about it. Mods had to spend a lot of time calming down those members and it was a hassle.
If the feature were actually useful at convincing members to change their posting behavior and not make certain posts, it would make sense. I'm not convinced that it does.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
& 
, get the negativity across adequately when one wishes to convey their disapproval.