ThePsychoticOne the Prohpet wrote:
Quote:
Rating up and down is so meaningless these days.
Then why not just ignore it? I get rated down constantly, regardless of what i post. It doesn't bother me one bit.
Personally I somewhat ignore it. I don't ignore it when I'm being karma camped, but being rated up or down rarely touches my heart. It's nice to be appreciated, just like it's not nice being unappreciated, but it's not making/breaking my day.
I see others who don't feel that way, though. When karma camping causes people to leave the site in frustration, I somewhat understand them. Someone is having a laugh being a petty *** and there's nothing you can do about it, except call an admin, which sort of defeats the whole karma system, user-moderated forum thing in the first place. Some people don't know about karma camping and how to deal with it and either leave or go postal, making their situation worse. This isn't a tryout for Allakhazam worthiness, so I don't see why people have to be tested through that sort of harassment. Maybe that stuff is great fun in the Asylum or OOT forum, but not so much the game boards (or at least the WoW board). Who knows, maybe some of those who just packed their bags and left because of a single camper would've gone on to make some valuable stuff for the site and the community.
The karma system has lost its original functionality, or rather, the finer functionality of it. If people rate a person down enough for it to have an effect, it's usually because that person is a spammer or total maniac, in which case a report post feature would work. Most of all the karma system is being used for that anonymous 'f*ck you' ratedown function. Instead of rating the post based on its value in the community, it's being rated based on whether or not the rater agrees with or likes it.
I just thought about something, though. How about removing the personal karma rating? Currently, if someone with 100 posts has a bad day and gets nuked into oblivion, that poster will have a hard time getting back up, because the tendency seems to be that the red arrow is prettier than the green one (or more fun to click, I don't know). Basically, someone can spend 100 posts writing nothing but good, make a few mistakes (like walking into the Asylum or OOT unprepared), get nuked into hell and then spend the next 24k posts trying to rebuild the reputation, until that person realizes that at his current post count, it would take an eternity to even get near the final form, causing him to be oddly apathetic about his posts, descending him into madness and drunken rage with little care for his physical wellbeing... or so I've heard.
Edited, Mar 15th 2010 8:51pm by Mazra