I wanted to weigh in here as well having now had a day to see the reputation system in action and I too feel the power of it soon becoming a double edged sword.

As you stated, punishing those for past behavior when they never knew it had consequences seems to be a bit biased. Our court system has statutes to prevent this sort of thing to the very reasons you mentioned. If it becomes illegal today, going back even 2 weeks to punish people for committing a crime before it was a crime seems a little to (pardon the pun) "Minority Report"ish to me. The new Rep system being rolled out without much consideration for the backlash may have been a bit hasty.

The idea of punishing pre-crimes before they were crimes seems as if it has certainly caused frustration among some users who were always told this was a free speech platform and an open forum without fear of censorship.

I'm not denying the merits of having such a system in place, but I do question the method in which it was just poofed into existence with retroactive consequences for past behaviors.

I for one was not affected negatively and many of us were actually quite assisted by the new system. There are others though who were not so lucky and are now suffering the effects from their lack of etiquette, trolling, botting, or other similar offenses.

I understand that in this day and age people should know how to maintain a sense of reasonable decorum online, but I'm sure each and everyone of us has had at least one incident where we hit send before considering the consequences and lived to regret it. There's no backspace in cyberspace, once it's out there it's all but irreversible.

Just as the sayings go, some bells can never be un-rung and people can not unhear the things you say. While this seems like it would be common sense to anyone online who has used social media, a simple look at many popular feeds would beg to differ and seem to serve as evidence to the contrary...