The reporter loses a point because if they didn't you'd have people trying to flag stuff just to go to war with people and the mod queue would fill with fake reports. With this, there is a very slight consequence to making the decision to flag someone. The reality is that it would be pretty rare for you to feel the need to report more then 5 posts on the boards a day.
If you're a good user you have nothing to worry about reporting a bad post and losing a point, because you're not worried about 9 other people that day attacking you.
Take 5 mins and run through the scenarios of people going into board wars. Having the reporter lose a measely point for the report doesn't hurt them in any way. By the next day, they're back to zero anyway. It does however prevent people from trying to spam-flag a good user.
The reason we don't show karma is because it's not neccessary to know. I can pretty much garunttee 99.9% of our users will be at 0 everyday. The only reason we explain the scoring is so that it's transparent and you understand the rules. The reality is we're becoming a larger site and it's impossible to ask our forum mods to read every post in every thread. By giving them a report mechanism they can now act more quickly to things the community deems inappropriate. Saying you hate halo isn't going to get you in trouble. The mods would look at it, quickly laugh and ignore the report, thereby giving the "offending" user his point back. And hey, as we all know, Giant Bomb is pretty lax about its forums. That's not going to change. This really just helps us take care of the 2 or 3 asshats every day who love to jump on the site and post porn or directly attack other users. The fact that most people don't see that happening on our boards is a tribute to our mod crew.
As we see how it works, we'll roll this same system into comments, user reviews and trivia over the next week. Believe me, it's nothing to be worried about.
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