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Reputation?! It's just a number. No-one knows that you received negrep other than you.
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Respect goes to the higher numbers, regardless of the value of their posts.
In the case of noobs, who start off with zero and then get negrepped to oblivion because we're all a bunch of humorless, noob-hating assholes; they get a nice, big, ugly red spot under their join date as a reminder to them and everyone else just how invaluable and inferior their input is.
And hey, if you don't want to connote it as reputation, perhaps you should use a word other than "rep".