Maybe I am just missing something then, but what exactly is the practical negative effect of that?
Besides the UI displaying it which some may interpret as the user being spammy (which again is purely a UI thing in the end).
Anyway, after writing my first comment above, I went and gave him 3 upvotes on his posts.
There is one practical effect of a reputation score <10 but >0, Steemit won't let someone upload images to the image hoster if their rep is lower than 10.