Yup, you are right exile. They are worth 800. See this link
here. Thanks for catching that.
So it
is 800? Thanks for the confirmation, Lisa... nothing else made sense, but I'm wrong often enough that I was unsure of whether my impressions were anywhere near the ballpark.
Well, I don't care so much if the system exists or not, but I don't see any problem at all if someone with the reputation of Exile, or any of the other high rep people, can add two 'pips' to someone's reputation. Who better to make that decision than those that have the power. I think this has all been blown way, way out of proportion and all started by somebody who was 'banned' from the board ... LOL ... isn't that ironic?
14 K, I appreciate the vote of confidence, very much... but maybe it's just as well. As time has gone on I've come to wonder about my judgment, and whether it should have the kind of impact that it does under the current setup. I've tried not to give rep frivolously, and I've given neg rep only a handful of times, when someone who was deserving of better treatment was dumped on in a purely destructive way; I hate that. But the more impact you have, the greater the chance that you're skewing things in a way that reflects badly—and unfairly so—on other people....
I think of the whole rep business this way...
You start as an unknown quantity, a new personality on the board, contributing your perspective on things to the eternal conversation. As time goes on, and your own thinking evolves, your views become clearer not just to the rest of the board, but to yourself: partly (maybe largely!) as a result of your discussions with other members, you begin to hammer out a set of views, analyses, and frameworks for thinking about a range of MA topics that have particular significance to you. People come to understand your take on these issues—so for me, for example, I've made my views fairly clear about the importance and role of kata, the crucial evidence and issues in the KMAs, the value of weight training and a few other particular issues that resonate with me—and you find yourself offering links to your previous posts, rather than restating whole chunks of evidence, reasoning and argument from scratch. As kidswarrior and Sukerkin have pointed out, you move into a somewhat different phase of your posting `career'; you've laid out your thinking on the things that you have something to say about, the places where you can contribute, and what you have to say subsequently is more in the nature of refinements and amplifications of points you've already made.
Academics find this happens in their scholarly careers as well: you stake out an area, make certain contributions, develop and defend them, and then go on to apply them more broadly and push them still further, but at a certain point, your colleagues know who you are and what you think. Short of completely reinventing yourself, you're not going to have the same impact on discourse in the fora you're interested in that you did when you were an unknown quantity... the best you can probably do under the circumstances is try to encourage others, people new to the board especially, to become seriously involved in the discussions and develop their own perspectives and analyses....
