Replace hyphen in front of scores/reputation by minus

I’ll note that the recent achievements pop-up already uses true minus signs for reputation changes instead of hyphens.

Though this alone may not be enough to compel you to switch, Codidact doesn’t have this problem.

Here’s a userscript. The initial version took me about half an hour to write, so it did not require very much effort at all (and I am at a disadvantage in that I cannot easily identify every place where a negative value can appear, and fixing it up after-the-fact in the DOM adds considerable overhead; doing this server-side would be simpler and cleaner). This was easy to do. All it takes is some political will.

// ==UserScript==
// @name     Stack Exchange: minus signs
// @grant    none
// @run-at   document-start
// @match    https://*.stackexchange.com/*
// @match    https://*.superuser.com/*
// @match    https://*.stackoverflow.com/*
// @match    https://*.mathoverflow.net/*
// @match    https://*.serverfault.com/*
// @match    https://*.askubuntu.com/*
// @match    https://stackapps.com/*
// @exclude  https://api.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://data.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://openid.stackexchange.com/*
// @exclude  https://contests.stackoverflow.com/*
// @exclude  /^https?:\/\/winterbash\d{4,}\.stackexchange\.com\//
// ==/UserScript==

const SELECTOR = `
  .rep-down,
  .ob-post-votes,
  .js-vote-count,
  .js-vote-count > *,
  .js-discussion-score,
  .js-discussion-score > *,
  .mini-counts,
  .mini-counts > :only-child,
  .answer-votes,
  .js-metadata-vote-count,
  .s-activity-indicator,
  .s-post-summary--stats-item,
  .s-post-summary--stats-item-number,
  .s-badge,
  .s-badge > span:only-child,
  .js-followed-post .fs-body3,
  .vote-count-post,
  .vote-count-post > :only-child,
  .flex--item > div,
  .vote,
  .-stats,
  .movedDown,
  .bounty-indicator-tab,
  td.event-comment > span > span,
  .slick-cell.number
`;

const replaceHyphen = (obj, prop) => {
  const oldValue = `${obj[prop]}`;
  const newValue = oldValue.replace(/(?<=^|\s|[\[\(])\u002d(?=\d)/gu, '\u2212');
  if (oldValue !== newValue)
    obj[prop] = newValue;
};

const fixupNode = node => {
  if (!node.matches(SELECTOR))
    return;
  if (node.title)
    replaceHyphen(node, 'title');
  if (node.firstChild?.nodeType === document.TEXT_NODE)
    replaceHyphen(node.firstChild, 'data');
};

const fixupUnder = node => {
  fixupNode(node);
  for (const subnode of node.querySelectorAll(SELECTOR))
    fixupNode(subnode);
}

if (document.body)
  fixupUnder(document.body);

new MutationObserver(mutations => {
  for (const mut of mutations) {
    switch (mut.type) {
      case 'characterData':
        fixupNode(mut.target.parentNode);
        break;
      case 'attributes':
        fixupNode(mut.target);
        break;
      case 'childList':
        fixupUnder(mut.target);
        break;
    }
  }
}).observe(document, {
  childList: true,
  attributes: true,
  attributeFilter: ['title'],
  characterData: true,
  subtree: true,
});