I think it would be useful to change Reputation points into two words "Positive" if > 0 and "Negative" if < 0 and leave it at that.
There's really no need to keep the points because it only feeds stupid behavior like this.
It's gamification of discussions in a place that doesn't need it - we're not hungry for MAU stats, no one cares about MAU because we don't have venture capitalists funding the service.
Get rid of Reputation points.
Use upvote/downvotes solely for page/thread sorting purposes.
Just like Mastodon has done some design choices (like not allowing re-posting with quotes), I think the threadiverse needs to have similar thoughts about the posting culture we want to cultivate.