Zer0

I post and mod on a forum which has a thanks system in place and I think it does more harm than good. Basically what it encourages people to do is thanks-whore by trying to make the wittiest posts they can so they can massage their e-dick. This often leads to completely pointless and counter-productive replies to serious and potentially interesting threads and can often derail a thread before it even gets off the ground. There seems to be a common habit in some threads to try to be the first to reply with a witty remark and receive loads of thanks from everybody, even if the reply adds nothing to the original post and in quite a lot of cases it doesn't. Some people will even just thank posts and not contribute anything at all just like the way people vote in polls here and not add anything in the thread itself.

It does have it's benefits such as posts which actually deserve thanks getting just that. This can be useful when you're skimming through a non-debate thread with quite a lot of posts and you only want to find the posts worth viewing. It also discourages people from replying to posts with just '+1' or 'I agree' which is a complete waste of a post if you ask me.

I think MB is just fine without a thanks or rep system in place and a simple statistic such as a post count doesn't even mean that much to me.

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