Should we get rid of reputation up/down votes?

[Djhg2000]

Well we can't design a friendly community with the presumption that our systems must deal nicely with abuse. I firmly believe that if a user abuses the reputation system you deal with the abusing user, not the reputation system itself.

I think the ability to give negative reputation serves as an important reminder that no user is immune to negative feedback when they do bad things. If I do something bad I'd rather get a negative reputation with a short explanation, which our reputation system thankfully allow, than people silently ignoring me without explanation. When I get negative reputation (thankfully hasn't been necessary yet) I can deal with the issue and improve myself in a way that simply isn't possible otherwise.

Say for instance that I get something wrong, like really wrong, and people start taking it as advice damaging their boards. If I get public negative reputation saying "hey, this damaged my board, please don't tell people to do this" then people will know to be a bit careful before following my advice. If anything this calls for a small notice to be placed at the bottom of posts for which people have submitted reputation changes, or at least for the negative ones.

One could argue that forum posts should suffice for giving negative feedback but I think that takes away from the idea of having a reputation system; it needs to reflect the actual reputation of a user, including the bad parts.

Now that I think about it, I've seen systems without negative votes get abused for more often than systems with them. It's one of the controversial parts of Reddit for instance but it has lead to a fair degree of the community moderating itself. I've seen plenty of other sites where people start using positive votes as a measurement of how much to listen to a user, and people then exploiting the system by making lots of low quality posts likely to get a few positive votes to use as a battering ram in heavy conversations. There has to be a risk associated with making bad posts.

That's my opinion on the matter anyway but I also agree that it's a complex topic.

But I also have to ask a few questions:

1. Is this an actual widespread problem we're having or is it something we're afraid is going to become a problem in the future?
   
2. Why can't we just suspend users abusing the reputation system under the Rules -> General Guidelines -> points 2, 7 & 10?
   
3. Can't moderators roll back malicious reputation changes? From what I can tell the rules should allow for it (General Guidelines point 11)?
   

Finally I want to end by saying it's nice to have community interaction before implementing changes like this, it's a nice refresher from other communities I've been to recently. Thank you @Luke !