Nothing can. However, rep is pretty darn good in the scheme of things. Taking this logic further, we should never do anything since nothing is ever perfect.
Yes, someone can get a few lucky 100 (using the SE scale) rep here and there while contributing little to the site. Someone can even go out of their way to do some mechanical tasks for a few 100 more rep. Maybe if you hit the Hot Network Questions jackpot, you might get a 1000 rep for little effort.
The above is all relatively small noise on a much larger signal. Nobody is going to get even 10,000 rep, let alone 100,000 rep by gaming the system. Getting that kind of rep requires writing a lot of good answers over a long period of time. If I remember right, it took me a few years to reach 100,000 rep on EE.SE, and I was one of the most active answerers on the site. I just checked, and it took me 8 years and 5.6 k answer to get 290 k rep. There is simply no way to “game” that.
Don’t let 2% noise on the signal obscure the value of the other 98%. And, that’s only looking at the negative but ignoring the advantages. High rep gives public recognition as reward to experts, fosters a little competition to draw out more effort, provides something to aspire to, and yes, it’s fun. I understand it may not be for all sites, but it will be essential for sites where the core users are professionals that are there in part to showcase their expertise.
I don’t think that’s our goal, though. The entire purpose of a Q&A site is to help others, not ourselves. We necessarily benefit when the whole group benefits, of course, but I disagree with your assertion that reputation is needed to showcase your expertise.
Expertise should be measured based on the content and contributions of the user, not an abstract score that attempts to measure those things. If you want to showcase your professionalism, you shouldn’t be pointing at a number, you should be showcasing your questions and answers.
Perhaps we should have a way for users to pin their favorite contributions or Q/As on their profile. Steam allows users to showcase badges and games on their profile. Maybe we could do something similar.
Not really. Everyone has different motivations. However, none of that matters anyway. There is no reason to care why someone provides good content, only that they do.
Right. But, you can’t expect each user to look at all the contributions of another user themselves. That’s why rep is so useful. It shows you at a quick glance what the general consensus is about the quality of contributions of that user. That is exactly this measurement based on the content and contributions of the user that you describe.
I think there are three different but very related issues here:
Reputation sometimes leads to inappropriate privilege levels
Reputation can be earned inappropriately, giving a false appearance regarding “overall expertise”
Reputation is the motivation for some users, both “experts” and “non-experts”
The first is easy enough to solve (we hope) by setting privileges (aka Trust Levels) based on specific groups of actions rather than a single mashed-everything-together number. That has clear consensus, even if some of the specifics (how many of this or that, alternate combinations, etc.) are still to be worked out (and may vary by community, etc.)
For the second, I’m really not too concerned in general. An occasional “bad” answer that gets upvoted will happen, but the odds of that happening repeatedly are pretty slim. The exception is HNQ. I like HNQ: I have found a lot of interesting stuff that way, joined several sites because of it, and benefit occasionally from the extra rep. it gives me if I hit the jackpot.
HNQ will not be a concern initially - it only becomes a factor when there are a lot of new users on a community because of it. I haven’t figured out a solution, because:
A single vote from each “new via HNQ” user can add up quickly.
While we can and maybe should (for a variety of reasons) limit the number of votes allowed from “new-to-a-community” users, we’ll certainly allow at least one, and that is enough for FGITW answers to get a lot of votes if there is question with a catchy title, etc.
Arguably, the single reputation number at least limited the problem of HNQ because of the daily cap. If we say “no single number and don’t link to privileges” then there isn’t any “cap” either, and then seeing “Net Answer Votes Received” loses (relatively speaking) the damage-control aspect of looking at a daily-capped-reputation. So my possible solution below ends up with its own problems…
One partial solution may be to make relevant component numbers visible. When you look at a user profile you see:
Net Question Votes Received
Net Answer Votes Received
# of Edits
Number of Questions
Number of Answers
And then when looking at an actual page, something like:
When you see a name for a Question, show next to it the total # of questions from this user and net Question votes
When you see a name for an Answer, show next to it the total # of answers from this user and net Answer votes
When you see a name for an Edit, show next to it the # of Edits
Just a thought. But it might provide some of the gamification/visibility without relying on a single number.
I think this is the core of our disagreement. From a website perspective, sure, we want content. But the entire reason we have this site in the first place is because SE didn’t care enough about its users.
A more accurate statement about what I think our goals should be:
We should always care, whether or not good content is provided, but we encourage good content and discourage bad content.
This site is first and foremost about the users, not the content, and that’s why we are here. SE cares more about the content, legal matters, and money. We should put users first.
And that’s why a user’s motivations do matter, because any content they create will be influenced by their motives. If someone cares about users, they do their best to help users, whether or not rep is on the line. If someone cares about reputation, they follow a script in order to get that.
We aren’t doing HNQ now, if ever. We haven’t talked about it.
This is addressed generally, not just to you: let’s be careful about our assumptions. We’re not building an SE clone. “SE has X” does not automatically mean “Codidact has X”. Maybe it will, if we think it’s a good idea. Maybe we think it’s a terrible idea. Often it’ll be somewhere in between; we like the concept but approach it differently.
Even then, it’s really not that large in the scheme of things. I’ve gotten a bump from that a few times, but those blips were still small in the overall scheme of things. Anomalies will always occur, but as long as the relative noise level remains small compared to the signal, it’s just something you live with.
This probably matters even less in your scheme where you show both the total number of answers and the resulting vote aggregate. If someone has only 10 answer then their vote total isn’t all that meaningful yet. If someone has 200 answers, then one or two anomalies aren’t going to make much difference to the total votes anyway.
I agree with the idea, but I think this is a false dichotomy. I would say that having good content is what makes us good for the users. We need both. But I think we have to focus on good content so that we can be helpful to our users.
I’m convinced that rep is one of the reasons that SE has been so successful. The entire concept of gamification is a good one! It provides the motivation for people to use their valuable time to create good content and help people they will never even meet. It makes it fun and exciting to check back regularly, just to see if you’ve gotten something new.
If people want to chase a big number, great! Keep the good content coming! If they like badges, woohoo! The more you help, the more you get! If you don’t need these things to help you contribute, wonderful! You can ignore them!
(Even here, on this forum, we get badges for doing new things. And it’s fun )
To bring it back on-topic, I think per-tag rep may be a very good idea. It seems similar to, but more visible, than the Tag Badge process on SE. I, like Olin, could get behind the summary given by @manassehkatz.
These are two orthogonal things, and the last statement is a bit misleading. SE has de-emphasized contributors. This seems to have been largely driven by excessive favoring of ordinary users. They see the users as providing clicks, and therefore revenue. At least that’s my perception without be privy to any of their internal communication.
OK so far.
Not necessarily. Building a repository of answers is also certainly a part of it.
No. It doesn’t work that way. Even in your terms, that script would say “write high quality answers”. The result, which either way is all you truly care about, ends up being the same.
We couldn't have Andy or Spehro or Stevenvh have the top rep on the site, now could we? I mean, geesh, that would subvert world order and end the universe as we know it.
Now think about how those aims are addressed. It’s done by writing a lot of good answers. You simply can’t get a lot of rep without doing exactly what you want a contributor to do. Of the 5612 answer I wrote, even the top one only accounted for 1.3% of the total 291,000 rep. And, that’s a pretty good answer even if I say so myself. What exactly do you think is undeserved, or should have been different?
Maybe you can game the system and get a few 100 rep somehow, although I’m not sure how to actually do that. But, that’s just a small blip in the scheme of things. Even then, why bother? Writing a good answer or two is the quickest way to gain rep and a lot less trouble than trying to figure out the system and exploit some loophole.
Take a look at some of those answers and you will see that the “script” (your words, not mine) was nothing but “Write a good answer that the OP and others will think is awesome”. And, it’s not just me. Take a look at answers from a few of the other top users on the site. They all got there by doing exactly what we want them to do.
I appreciate the discussion. Several people made good points.
However, I feel that the opposing points being made - while all good - just argue for different end goals.
I have created a post for figuring out those end goals.
I feel that until that is resolved, either side will just continue to make good arguments for their particular end goal. There will not be a meaningful conclusion here (we could vote, but it would just be what the majority feels).
Sure there is, and there are (anecdotally) quite a few users on SO with tens of thousands of rep gained this way, and probably more than one with 100k.
Just answer dupes with copy-pasted answers instead of voting to close, and watch the votes roll in. Sure, the answers aren’t quite as good as they would be if they were just in one place, the canonical dupe target, with focused, non-duplicated edit and comment attention. But who cares? There are upvotes to get!
Imagine a hundred questions with identical scores. If they are split equally into 10 tags instead of one single tag, the number next to each person’t name will be 1/10th of what it would be if they all had the same tag.
As for possible reputation system, what do you think about implementing a maximum for single question - lets say you get 10 points for first vote, 9 for second and so on, with this you get 55 points for upvotes and 15 for acceptance, this gives 70 total for one question, no more. Votes still will be shown, but no points gain.
With this people who are more active (more correct answers) will be renked higher that those with very few answers but with hundreds of upvotes.
Question to all: what problem are you trying to solve? Why do we need a reputation system (a) at all or (b) per tag? Before jumping to “reputation is the answer”, we need to know what the problem is.
I deduce the following problems from past discussion:
People want to be rewarded for their contributions.
People want to compete with each other, and a numeric score does that clearly.
People want to be able to tell which other people are the relative experts (a) at all or (b) in these tags.
Did I miss any?
I think there are better ways to do those things, but before saying more – before, IMO, any of us should say more about implementation – I want to see if there are other problems motivating these requests.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. On a given question, for a given user’s rep display, multiply the average of all their relevant tag scores by the total number of tags they have a score (or a non-zero score) for? Or something? I guess that would eventually settle down, but it seems like the number of tags would be pretty volatile for folks with comparatively little site experience, making it difficult for them to get any sort of idea what their rep would be the next time they saw a question with the same tags.
I want to see if there are other problems motivating these requests.
I wouldn’t call motivating things only problems, there are some advantages in my opinion that reputation/score system will bring (still not sure which a/b is better, maybe other). What you have mentioned is quite broad so some of the below is somehow connected with yours:
helps to maintain better quality of the posts - some of users will put more work to gain more reputation,
reputation is higly connected with voting, without this votes lose some value.
people may want to know from who they get the answer (doesn’t mean that ‘expert’ cannot be wrong or newbie cannot right).
high reputation also brings responsibility (at least as I see it) to keep quality of the posts,
people develop and want to see it somehow - most of users are not experts when they start, but during their parcitipation, work and so on they become ones. People collect diplomas/certificates/prizes, this is nothing other.
Regarding (a)
That is diligence.
But did we also have this level of diligence when we decided to remove reputation?
What problem did we actually solve with that?
And is that worth losing people who want to write highly rated answers?
After all, we started out from “SE is a good system, but the greedy company behind makes it suck”.
I don’t want to engage in whataboutism here, but I feel that before we ask for a good reason for keeping the working system the way it is, we need a good reason to change it.
To me, [only having selfless people] seems more like a reason to start a religion than a website.
Regarding (b)
That was just an improvement to the rep system, which, now that I think about it, might not apply everywhere. On French Language, rep probably just means “this user is good at French”.
But on SO, somebody who’s excellent at C# might have no idea about Python; somebody who’s good with databases might give bad advice about version control systems. And it also would be a pity to split this into all those subgroups, because there’s a lot of overlap between things.
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