Funnily enough, my sims roll those two a lot, to the point that I kind of roll my eyes now at the redundancy. "Oh, you mean you want to just show off how nice/mean you are again? Okayyyy." And I mainly treat it as a want to just go to a community lot.
I assume it has to do with their Niceness, whether they roll the good/bad rep one. My Jessica Peterson, for example, rolled Have a Bad Reputation a lot until I stopped fulfilling it and pushed her to get a better one (for the sake of doing better in business, since her LTW was the $100K one); now she's often close to having a maximally good rep but certainly never thinks of rolling Have a Good Reputation.
The thing that's a bit cheesy (and why the want pair often makes me roll my eyes) is that both of them are rolled with no check as to whether the sim already has whichever one they supposedly want. (I've often also said to the screen, "But you already *have* that reputation, dear.") In other words, even if the sim already has that rep level, the want is not fulfilled until the very next time they interact in the appropriate way on a community lot (a "nice" way for good reputation, a "mean" way for bad reputation).
(Though come to think of it...now I wonder whether the game actually has any check at all for the character of the action that caused the belated rep-level validation. That is, if the sim already has max good reputation, is the Have a Good Reputation want still fulfilled even if the next reputation-affecting action is actually a mean one, like gossip? Because they'd still technically Have a Good Reputation if they were maxed out before and just gossiped once, right? Hm!)
Edited for clarity...and to add that my experience has been that reputation does not have to be either maxed or, um, minimumed (?) out for the appropriate want to be fulfilled. The reputation level just needs to be strongly in the positive or negative direction.
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