reporting abuse versus negative rating

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here's a scenario: you see a one word (or two) discussion that does not make sense at all and obviously not for eliciting a worthwhile discussion but just to increase post number. You see that the responses have already reached 2 pages, most of them single sentence and even one or two word responses. What do you do? Are you compelled to report that as abuse since it's obviously against mylot rules? Or do you just give that person a negative rating? I just came across a discussion like that a few minutes ago. I was compelled to press the (!) button but stopped and thought about the many respondents that will be affected if the discussion was deleted. You see, when you are new to mylot, you really don't know yet what's acceptable or not. Most often we're just too excited to start posting away. You see other members with thousands of post count responding to this discussion and you think that maybe it's not as taboo as you have interpreted the rules to be. I hate to punish these members by reporting the discussion. I know that they would soon find their way around mylot. So I just give a negative rating to the one who started the discussion for initiating a discussion that's against the rules and only takes space on mylot.