Looking through the history of the Reputation board, I observed that during time, its use changed completely.

The board has 109 pages of topics. Between pages 77 and 109 (meaning the oldest topics), this part of the forum was used by members for writing topics about their own reputation, trying to show they are honorable persons or trustworthy traders. The methods were a bit different, but their aim was always the same.

For example, some used to ask feedback from the others:



And, in many cases, the replies to their topics were stating words which were building good reputation for OPs:


Others though took a different approach and posted all the activities considered to bring them good reputation:



But, no matter the topics content, the titles were always the same: "Profile name - Reputation thread".

Hundreds and hundreds of topics were created on this fashion:
- cryptocoinhunter reputation thread (not cryptohunter lol)
- sonihr Reputation thread
- sharkbyte093's Reputation Thread.

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Somehow, everything changed since page 77 (meaning the newest 1-77 pages of the board). Excepting a buffer number of pages where the above kind of topics still appeared, in the end they disappeared completely. Their place was taken by thousands of topics where people seemed to not be interested at all in their own reputation, but in the reputation of the others. And not in a good way.

This board became a place where members expose the bad behavior of others, where they point to others activities or behavior, where they accuse others, where they express their grievance and where they explain why they believe X or Y is scam, why X or Y are not suited for their position inside the forum and so on. Of course, not all the accusations are true, as not all of them are false. But this is not the subject of this topic.

As I was writing above, the members are more focused on others reputation and not in a good way. I don't remember even a single topic regarding someone's good reputation. To see words such as "oh, man, this guy is a great trader!". Or "this DT member really deserves his place". Or "this member always used the trust (or merit) system as he should". These kind of topics don't exist, unfortunately.

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Seeing all this interesting history and the abrupt change which took course on pages 1-77, I couldn't stop asking:
- why the members stopped building topics for consolidating their reputation? Reputation is essential on the free market and I knew that, as it can be seen from this link. Apparently, many others forum users knew that as well, since in the pages 77-109 the early forum users were trying to show their trustworthiness and the fact that others should make deals with them. So what happened? Suddenly nobody else is interested in showing he /she has a good reputation? Suddenly everybody forgot about the key importance of having a good reputation

- how is it possible that in 77 pages, each containing 40 topics, to not see a single topic related to self-built-reputation (maybe this is an exaggeration; most likely there are still a few such topics left)?

- I had in mind to ask why is this board now full of topics where some members accuse others for various facts, but I just realized this happens as there is no such other suitable place on the entire forum. However, another question just popped: how is it possible to not have such accusations in the oldest pages of the Reputation board (pages 77-109)? Could it be that during those ancient times, no user had any beef with any other user? I assume not. Conflicts exist for thousands of years. Then how did the members manage to deal with their grievance in the beginning? Were they writing accusation topics on other boards?

I'm curious what others think about these questions and also about the abrupt change of the Reputation board. Is it a good change?