Increasing your rep is a long hard fought journey. You're going to need 50 low level people or 10 high level people to rep you just to get you to the second of eleven levels. In your example, the person your describing will not wind up with a top rated rep. There is no reason to leave negative rep because they're not going anywhere anyway.
BTW, people with years of experience and thousands of posts could erase all of your positive rep with one negative hit. Imagine 10 people you respect on this board all gave you high rep but, they happened to have low power (like the majority of you newcomers) and someone like me came along and thought your were being a clown, is it really fair for me to be able to undo all of your rep with one click? Because, that is what could happen.
That said, there is more to this forum than just stocks. Just because someone doesn't know about stocks doesn't mean they couldn't help someone with a hardware issue or just be a generally helpful person. Like in real life, your reputation is a sum of many things.
I'd be willing to bet any sum of money that people would simply leave negative rep on people they don't like or have had a problem with in the past regardless of their actual knowledge. Thats how people work.
So, what would end up happening is, people would complain to me, throw a fit, start a flame war, and create unwanted tension on the board. They would say the negative rep was unjust and ask me to remove it... and then what? We create an forum courtroom thread where we vote on the validity of negative rep? Ain't nobody got time for that!
1. I bet if you didn't know negative rep was an option, you wouldn't have cared. I blame myself for even mentioning it.
2. Participating in repping is optional. You don't have to play if you don't want to.
3. In the spirit of democracy and catering to the people of this forum... if after reading my thoughts on the subject, 10 people tell me they want negative rep turned on, you got it!
The fight for negative rep is on -- yea or nea?