Well, I think not allowing any feedback (pos or neg) to a neg feedback certainly eliminates revenge feedback. It doesn’t eliminate negative feedback of course. Nobody wants to eliminate that, though I think everybody would like more information about negative feedback.

As most ebayer’s know, the positive feedback is largely noise. It’s full of overly glowing comments. What you really care about when you read the feedback profile of a person is the negs. eBay does not want you to see just the negs since they want you to feel it’s safe to buy on eBay.

What eBay can do is tell you more about the negs. They are now dividing buyer/seller which is good. They also should show it by dollar volume, and show which portion of the negatives come from brand new users or de-registered users. (They flag when a user is no longer on ebay but don’t count them.) They could even note the important difference between voluntarily deleted accounts and forcefully deleted ones. In fact, all feedbacks from a forcefully deleted account should probably vanish.

These are not necessarily new ideas. People have done research on reputation sy systems for some time, which eBay mostly doesn’t apply. On the other hand, they have the only real working reputation system of any scale.