I disagree -- I'm not going to down-vote your post to express it though.


Any system is going to be misused sometimes, but I think the way the new system allows people to rate posts rather than users is an improvement over the old per user rating, and I think it's generally being used pretty fairly. I do think it would be nice if more people would take the time to up-vote helpful posts on occasion, but apart from a few instances of particularly unpopular opinions I haven't personally seen a lot of gang-down-voting, and even then I would really still consider what happened to be a correct usage of the system.

The display of negative reputation has been capped to 0 in the forums but I've noticed (at least for me) still shows up in the profile, which would probably be worth fixing.

I don't see the problem with down-votes being visible on individual posts -- sure, it can be discouraging in cases where it isn't deserved, but it's pretty good at highlighting when the community thinks an answer is wrong or bad, and unlike a hidden system it actually gives users some feedback as to what content they have posted that people have disagreed with -- being able to search "my content" sorted by down/up-votes would probably help make this feedback even more useful. I did myself propose an adjustment to the system where down-votes on an individual post would not show up until a couple of people had also voted it down, but I believe the idea was generally unpopular.

... I think the way the new system allows people to rate posts rather than users is an improvement over the old per user rating...
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Unfortunately, at the moment it does both, which I think leads to some troubles.

I think it is an improvement over the old system, mostly. The main problem for any such system is that everyone has a different idea of how it should work. My criticism of the current reputation system follows.

• I see the OP in some "For Beginners" (or someone posting elsewhere who clearly is a beginner) being down-voted. While these posts frequently display the kind of conduct cited as down-votable (vague questions, no error messages, limited code, lack of research, poor spelling/grammar), I think we all can appreciate that when you are starting out you just are not going to get all these things correct. This is a problem in the community rather than the tech I think, but maybe it would be nice to have some way of "warning" people that they are down-voting someone new to the site, and to encourage them to post feedback (via thread or direct message) rather than down voting them for rules they might not be aware of yet.
  
  
• Related is the fact that beginners have the same voting power as experienced users. So it can take a number of users to give a "balanced" rating to a post rather than the "this fixed my immediate problem" voting that newbies often use. This is a subtle problem, because it ties in with a popular criticism of the old rating system. Now that votes are on posts rather than people the community might be more open to this idea.
  
  
• Apparent direct mapping between post thumbs and reputation. I can't directly prove this but there seems to be a very strong link between the two, possibly even a 1 to 1 mapping. I think they should be slightly decoupled, e.g. only posts with +/- 3 points or more should contribute to your reputation.
  
  
• We now have what we always wanted with the old system, you can see the posts that people have voted up/down and change your behaviour accordingly! Except there is no way that I know of to see when your posts have been rated, or be notified when the rating changes. You basically will only see it for active threads, and then only in short ones where you are likely to see your older posts. This is essentially the same idea as detailed in the thread jbadams linked to.
  
  
• Long running threads can generate significant feedback on posts. In the "debate me about the bible" thread, some of the posts have a high "thumb" values, simply because the thread runs for a long time. I'm not sure whether we should have a moratorium on up/down voting on old threads, or have the age of the vote used to "dilute" it (e.g. first 3 days = 1 point, next 3 = .5 point, next 3 = .25 point, all others .1 point).
  

I think the new system gets a lot right, I like the idea of it anway. One major improvement I see is we no longer get the "spiral to zero", where a new user would get down-rated and complain about it until their rating reached zero. Though that was becoming less common in the old forums towards the end anyway. The only reputation spirals I've seen so far are obvious trolls.

I did myself propose an adjustment to the system where down-votes on an individual post would not show up until a couple of people had also voted it down, but I believe the idea was generally unpopular.
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Again, a tricky problem. In some of the less popular forums/threads, there might be only the one down vote on a post that contains inaccurate information. There is also the problem that unless you see UI feedback when using the system people will probably stop voting.

• Apparent direct mapping between post thumbs and reputation. I can't directly prove this but there seems to be a very strong link between the two, possibly even a 1 to 1 mapping. I think they should be slightly decoupled, e.g. only posts with +/- 3 points or more should contribute to your reputation.
• Long running threads can generate significant feedback on posts. In the "debate me about the bible" thread, some of the posts have a high "thumb" values, simply because the thread runs for a long time. I'm not sure whether we should have a moratorium on up/down voting on old threads, or have the age of the vote used to "dilute" it (e.g. first 3 days = 1 point, next 3 = .5 point, next 3 = .25 point, all others .1 point).

These both seem like good ideas.

Apparent direct mapping between post thumbs and reputation. I can't directly prove this but there seems to be a very strong link between the two, possibly even a 1 to 1 mapping. I think they should be slightly decoupled, e.g. only posts with +/- 3 points or more should contribute to your reputation.

Multiply rated posts tend to mean something different than posts that only get +1 though.
From what I can tell, someone who gets lots of "+1"'s is generally posting advice that helps specific members. On the other hand, someone who occasionally gets a "+5" has just said something popular / funny.
Many small bumps seems to indicate helpfulness, while a few large bumps indicates popularity :/

Long running threads can generate significant feedback on posts. In the "debate me about the bible" thread, some of the posts have a high "thumb" values, simply because the thread runs for a long time. I'm not sure whether we should have a moratorium on up/down voting on old threads, or have the age of the vote used to "dilute" it (e.g. first 3 days = 1 point, next 3 = .5 point, next 3 = .25 point, all others .1 point).[/quote]This happened with the old system too. I had a colleague who stopped coming here, because one day he logged in to see his rep had dropped by 600 points overnight. Turns out a mod had dug up an old thread where he made a distasteful joke (which no one seemed to notice at the time) and this mod missed the humour and took it as a serious post, and absolutely flamed the crap out of him for it. This bumped the thread onto active topics, where lots of people read the flaming, agreed, and down-voted him.

At the same time though, I've come across a lot of old posts via Google, and use the "+1" button when finding good advice...

Most people just click "down" when they don't like that post (most of the time because they didn't understand the post and felt like it was just nonconstructive attempt to troll) which would be "fine" (as fine as democratic forum posting rating system can be) if they did equal amount of "voting up" on all posts they like.

It would be interesting to see what the average ratio of +1's vs -1's is. Over time, will the average rating go up or down?

Contrary to what was said, this system doesn't provide feedback, just "how people feel about your post"[/quote]It would be interesting if in order to use that button, you had to type in a reason - so people could read the list of reasons it was up/down voted.

Good points Hodgman. I don't actually think there is a perfect system that can balance all these competing problems without losing some of the upsides.

OP: I rated you down. It was me. Here.

Why? I'm no actually sure.

I guess that in "reality" people is entitled to dislike you for no reason.