but it's pretty good at highlighting when the community thinks an answer is wrong or bad

Majority is always right yeah?

[quote name='jbadams' timestamp='1307425378' post='4820405']but it's pretty good at highlighting when the community thinks an answer is wrong or bad

Majority is always right yeah?[/quote]There's a big difference between absolute right/wrong and community standards.

OP: I rated you down. It was me. Here. Why? I'm no actually sure.

It was an unspoken rule on the old forums that anyone who mentioned ratings would be rated down by everyone

I often check down rated posts to see if I agree and if not, I try to cancel it out with an up vote. I'm curious to what my up to down vote ratio is.
Rip-off and Hodgman make some good points and judging by their ratings, they do that all the time . I wouldn't worry too much about reputation, after reading a gazillion amount of posts I often look at the users name instead of his/her reputation. Their reputation is stored in my brain and is based on all their posts I've read, not the number under their name. There are a lot of members in this community that I would follow blindly because they've build up their name, not their reputation.

Aye, a persons reputation isn't very important now but the post ratings can be useful.
Adding the ability to hide posts below a certain treshold would probably improve things further, (just replace them with the posters name, the rating and a button to show the full post).
In the technical forums it has the potential to be useful if its used primarily to highlight the really good or really bad posts (Its up to the community to make it work though).

I don't quite see the point of post ratings in the lounge (+- ratings are primarily handed out there to people having the "right" or "wrong" opinions and its not really interesting to know that half the board disagrees with another posters political views)

We appreciate all the thoughts and opinions. Keep em coming. We'll probably dedicate a new staff blog post to this topic soon