Despite the bitching, I think the reputation system is working OK...
When I'm going over new posts for curation (my 2 cents of upvote value that is) I now find myself looking at the reputation of a member.
I'm seeing that negative reputation is almost always related with serial spammers and copy/pasters of external links.
Those with very low reputation, like 1, also engage with such activity - copy/pasting articles, not providing external links. I've seen it quite a few times.
Things start getting interesting from rep6+, and especially 7-8+ where my curation time is better spent reading that. I'm making a few exceptions for lower reputations if I think there is something promising behind a title+intro.
Now, obviously, if everyone did the same as me, the lower reps would not climb easily to higher levels because everybody would be avoiding their curation (except in the comment section where one can see their contributions). However, the bottom line is that the reputation system, as it is right now, is working better than I expected.
By the way I almost forgot the auto-graying out of negative reputation posters, which is also a huge plus.
I want to thank the admins for providing it and I'm sure it'll improve over time to be of even more help to readers and curators.
I think it was of monumental importance to "get it right", while maintaining speed and scalability.
It works pretty good! I'm impressed.
What I especially like about it (especially with the greying option), is now I can see that my curating efforts haven't gone to waste when I see another post already pre-curated before I got there that is greyed out. :)
+1
I like the greying out as well, I think its great.
And the best part is that it dis-incentivizes the posting of crap and junk. Bots and spammers will be like "ok why bother? It's gonna get buried anyway". So less junk to sort.
The big issue with reputation is that if a person ends up with negative reputation unfairly the only way it appears to get them back to positive is to get people to vote for them. This is basically just giving them free SBD and steem power. They should fix the issues not count on people giving votes to threads that may not deserve them as a workaround. These people are making money from a broken system while content creators are getting nothing and stuck with no steem power.
That part may need some tuning, indeed. But I don't always "buy" the unfair reputation argument. Some times it may happen, but it should be a relatively limited phenomenon.
I upvote U