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I agree and can't wait to see how the new rep feature works and how different it really is.

Also, the rep just covers up the avatar and looks unappealing

True, maybe it's not needed, or maybe we can display a little checkmark for those with a high rep, and nothing for normal people, we'll see but if you have more ideas lmk!

Last year I would have said that it's not needed at LeoThreads. These days, it's good to know.

One use case for Reputation is to allow those 80+ to include a link in the original thread. < 79.9999... must include link in reply.

It doesn't need to be shown for the algo to know and use it for those things.

link-text isn't for the algorithm; it's for us. (especially if we're posting links from outside the Hive ecosystem).

I still don't see why it needs to be shown, because the system knows what you want it to and displays what you want it to

Whether it's HTML or Markdown, standard behavior is for link-text to be displayed with hyperlink functionality. Algorithms can break, so standard behavior would be the fallback position. link-text doesn't hurt with SEO, either.