Propose a privilege to sit in the 500 reputation mark

Question

As determined from earlier discussions, the retag privilege serves a lot more confusion and a lot less of its benefit due to the suggested edit system. It must be done away with. It will be done away with. ♪

In light of this decided course of action, we're going to need a new snack for the road between "Create Tags" at 300 reputation and "Established User" at 1000 reputation. We'd like your help in thinking about some ideas on what would be a nice privilege to sit at this level. Since we're... a bit dry on our end.

The primary guideline in deciding what kind of privilege to put here is acknowledging its position in the overall hierarchy of privileges. 500 reputation is an early-intermediate user, one who has started to really get the hang of the site and its function. It can be something that provides convenience in how they currently can act on the site, or it could be some new functionality that fits as an early ability (especially considering there's no new abilities until 2000 reputation's "Edit Everywhat" ability).

I look forward to hearing what creative ideas y'all can provide.

Answer 1

This may be a little controversial, but perhaps it would be worth while to:

Make access to the First Posts and Late Answer Review queues a 500 rep privilege.

Hopefully this will prevent the blind from leading the blind.

As a possible side benefit it may slow down the badge hunters till they get a better idea of what the review queues are really for and whats expected when doing a review.

As it stands "The "First Posts" review queue is ineffective and toothless" and this may be an opportunity to hit two birds with one stone.

Migrated from comments:

Perhaps it would be better to swap viewing +/- votes from 1k to 500 and put the first post/late answer reviews at the 1k level. It seems the majority of people think that 500 is a bit low.

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-Insert by Grace Note & Laura

This is what we have selected after much discussion, and it is now enabled network-wide.

Some users who participated in the review queues at 125 reputation will now be unable to do so, but we ran a query before making this change, and most reviewers have more than 500 rep anyway. Philosophically, we agree that it makes more sense for these queues to be accessible by people who have been on the site for a little bit longer – especially for the First Posts queue.

Here's why we chose this suggestion over the others posted here:

• The SE team all thought it was a good idea. We were split on whether some of the other suggestions were a good idea, but were in agreement on this one.

• It was easy to implement. You guys gave us some food for thought, but some of the other suggestions would take a lot more discussion, planning, and developer time to implement. We'll keep them in mind for the future, though.

• We weren't convinced that adding back the retag privilege made sense.

Answer 2

It depends if you're up for a little indoctrination or not... I think that, as a user around that sort of rep, you understand that questions sometimes get closed, or reopened. You're maybe trying to emulate (or fight against) the people who've been around longer voting on this. In other words, you understand something of the site.

Why not grant the view close and re-open votes privilege to every user at this reputation? That is, they can view every close and re-open vote, not just their own.

Yes, they won't be able to add their own in there but they can flag if they agree with the voter. Even better, they get to understand better what questions might not be suitable for SE. If a question has 4 close votes they might think twice about answering and flag instead.

It starts the process of people understanding, and most importantly having information about, what others believe is on-, or off-, topic on the site.

Answer 3

Grant chat privs to users who don't have enough reputation yet. Currently a user needs 20 rep to chat, but on some sites we often see a problem where a new user shows potential (worth investing in) but doesn't "get it" yet. I'd like to be able to get a user like that into chat, because the alternative is a conversation in comments -- an anti-pattern that we want to stamp out, not model. (New users also tend to have a forum mentality, so conversations in comments are the most natural thing in the world for them.)

We don't want to universally suspend the 20-rep barrier; that's been proposed and it opens the door too far. However, it should be easier to get any given new user into chat.

Moderators can grant individual users access, but you need to ping a moderator and then wait. At 500 rep, people know the basics and we should be encouraging them to help the newcomers. This would enable them to do so.

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Three years later: Followup proposal.

Answer 4

I've found that a common problem on Stack Exchange is that a question isn't reaching the right audience who could evaluate it, edit it if necessary, decide whether to close it, and (let's not forget that) answer it. A very important aspect of a question that determines its effective audience is its tags.

While suggested edits can be used to retag a question, they introduce an additional hurdle through a somewhat clunky interface, and they introduce a delay during which the question is still classified based on its old content and cannot be improved any further by sub-2k users.

At 500 reputation, you should begin to have an idea of the major tags used on the site. You should be able to figure out at least what the most important tags are for a question.

Therefore, I propose the following 500-rep privilege: retag questions (without supervision).

This could be done by using the existing ”edit” button, but making the edit effective immediately when only the tags have changed and the user has the retag privilege. The user interface would have to be tweaked slightly to indicate that a retag will not undergo peer review and not to require an edit summary.

Alternatively, this could be done by providing a separate “retag” button.

Answer 5

This was proposed as a separate feature request, but I was encouraged to also post it here:

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Grant 500 rep users the privilege to flag a post for reopening, just like they can flag for closing. The UI of the flagging dialog for closed post could look like this:

A reopen flag would bring the question in the "Reopen Votes" review queue, where 5 3K users would vote to reopen (or to leave closed), just like when a reopen vote is cast on a question.

Since the OP of a question can bring his question to the reopen queue by editing it, this option could be available to everybody else (above 500 points) except the OP of the question.

Answer 6

Remove rate-limiting on comments.

Answer 7

Let users cast the first duplicate close vote.

We want users to seek out duplicate questions, however, experienced users should be the ones to confirm the duplicate. Therefore, if a question does not have outstanding close votes, let 500-rep users cast only duplicate votes.

The noise generated would be minimal; the effort needed to seek out a duplicate nearly ensures that users will find an accurate duplicate (or none at all). Additionally, if users' votes consistently failed in CV review, their privilege could be suspended or revoked, at least until they reached 3K.

Answer 8

Why not move the suggest tag wiki edits privilege there?

Currently, any registered user can suggest tag wiki edits. I propose setting the minimum level for users to make such suggested edits to 500 rep. On graduated sites where creating tags requires more than 300 rep (1500 rep on SO), the tag wiki edit privilege could still stay at 500 rep.

Having a higher requirement for this privilege isn't so strange when you think about it. Voting to approve tag wiki edits already requires 5k, which is significantly more than the 2k required for edits on question and answer. Editing tag wikis without being reviewed (by trusted user) is currently the highest privilege at 20k, while typical edits don't require approval at 2k. So it's clear that tag wiki editing is already held to somewhat of a higher standard than Q&A editing, but that only applies on the higher end of the reputation spectrum at the moment.

Benefits for a (relatively low) bar for tag wiki edits:

By this point, the user will hopefully not be so concerned with the measly 2 rep gain per approved tag wiki edit. They'll be editing for the sake of making the tag wiki better, not to gain rep, which will hopefully lead to:

• Fewer plagiarized tag wikis. A 500 rep user is at least hopefully aware of site policies by that point, and knows what our standards are for tag wikis. They're far less likely to take the lazy approach of copying from somewhere else than low rep users. As reviewer It've seen a fair share of plagiarized tag wiki by new users on both recreation beta sites, like Anime & Manga and graduated sites like Arqade. It wouldn't surprise me if this were the case on other sites.

• People editing tag wikis are actually knowledgeable about the site. Hopefully they'll write good tag wikis which describe when the tag should be used on the site -- not just a definition of the term.

• Adding this as a privilege may bring more attention to the fact that tag wikis can be edited, as well as how a good tag wiki should be written, which would be a overall benefit in my opinion.

• Keeps the 500 rep bonus tag-related. While it might be not so important, it's compositionally pleasing and about the right level for users to start getting more deeply involved in the tag system, which is at the heart of the site for frequent users.

Potential issues:

• It may be a bit strange to have 300 rep as the minimum to create tags, but 500 to edit tag wikis. Reversing the order of these two might be better as it doesn't make much sense for someone to be allowed to create a tag, but not suggest a tag wiki for it. This could also raise the bar for creating new tags.

• Very low frequency tags may be less likely to get a good wiki, but I believe this seems like a minor issue.

Answer 9

Unlock the inline tag editing interface that's now apparently reserved to 10kers.

I mean, the whole point of the 500 reputation milestone was retagging, but retagging sucked because you have to remember to hit the 'retag' button, not the 'edit' button — until the 'retag' button goes away at 2k reputation. This doesn't make a lot of sense.

Since this is essentially an usability problem, fix it with the usability solution we already have. Also, this brings down a nice goodie all the way down from 10k-land where... it doesn't really belong.

Sounds underwhelming? Keep in mind the 1k reputation privilege, viewing split votes, isn't actually a privilege at all. This page is public although hidden and choke full of (occasionally useful) information.

Answer 10

In addition to Ben's answer of letting users see close/re-open votes, I'd propose we also let them see +/- vote counts on questions and answers.

I think that would help them get a better view of how the community works without giving them the opportunity to break anything.

Answer 11

Bounties.

Currently it only takes 75 reputation to set a bounty. Since the smallest award possible is 50, that means that someone who tries out that privilege as soon as it's available will be knocked back to 2/3rds of their starting reputation. I've seen new users do this—often in response to a kind veteran offering a bounty on their question. Bounties are pretty advanced features and many users never need to set them. So 75 is probably too soon to start offering them.

Look at what is between the current "offer bounties" mark and 500:

1. Self-answering Questions. (That should be the lead, not "Edit Community Wiki".)
2. Create Chat Rooms.
3. Vote Down. (And the "first posts" and "late answers" review queues.)
4. Reduce Ads. (On sites with ads.)
5. View Close Votes.

I'd trust a new user with these privileges long before they are ready to offer bounties. To be honest, I'd probably swap Established User with setting bounties and make that the 500 mark privilege. The ability to give away all of one's reputation (which would be possible at 500, but not at 1000), while amusing, is probably not a behaviour we should encourage.

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As an alternative (if setting bounties to attract attention on one's own questions is seen as too critical to wait for 500 or 100), perhaps established user should be moved down to 500 and setting bounties on other people's questions moved to 1000. While it would make the privilege ladder more complicated, it does separate a potentially critical privilege for a new user (getting one's own question answered) from a somewhat esoteric one (redistributing reputation points).

Answer 12

...late to the party, but in case this question is revisited for new privilege and rep level shuffles:

See vote counts!

There is no reason for that to remain at such a high rep level (1000), as it does not enable any powers to change to the site. There is also the argument that seeing up and down votes is beneficial to newer users as it provides a better view of how questions and answers are received on the site. (Even 500 would be too high, but it would be an improvement.)

On top of that, the 1000 rep level is titled "Established User", which seems even more like it should match up with privileges to shape the site.

Putting "see vote counts" at the 500 level (or lower) would solve all of this.

(Of course, you would need something more at the 1000 level if the chat room privileges granted there are not enough, but that's another question. At this point I nominate a swap between the 1000 and new 500 privileges, but other arrangements could work.)

Answer 13

My suggestion is to just bump the "Create gallery chat rooms" privilege from 1,000 reputation down to 500.

(Either by itself or in addition to another privilege that perhaps doesn't have a high enough "wow factor" on its own.)

Answer 14

I suggest something pretty simple that is also related to editing.

Users with 500 reputation should be already pretty familiar with the edit mechanism; while their edits still have to be reviewed, let's lower the amount of required reviewers by 1, at least to approve. This means that it will take only 2 reviewers to approve edit suggested by 500+ user on Stack Overflow, and one reviewer on other sites, like it was before the change.

From own experience in suggested edits, most edits from 500+ users are indeed good, bad edits usually come from low rep users. Of course there are still those who keep suggesting bad/invalid edits way after 500 and 1000 rep but still, in my opinion this will work fine and will make the users happy with their new privilege, hopefully encouraging more good edits.

Answer 15

Double permitted votes at 500 rep (for comments and posts). By the time people get to 500 they're (at least hopefully) familiar with the site and what should be voted up and down. Additionally if they're part of a sock puppet ring they've hopefully been caught by this point. I often find myself hitting the vote cap and a relaxation of the cap would be very much appreciated (but I understand the danger for allowing new users loads of votes).