New reputation changes. Is applying it retroactively fair?

Question

This is regarding this blog post: Important Reputation Rule Changes

Hello, I'm one of those people that has earned at least half of their reputation asking questions. I can completely understand the point of the change for the weight of votes on questions. My question is why does it need to be retroactive? To me this seems unfair to the community and I'll be quite put off if I lose edit or closing privileges(half of the things I do now are just go through editing questions). I have over 4000 rep, so I probably have nothing to worry about.. but I'm thinking of all the other users.

So moderators/Jeff what is the point of this change being retroactive?

Answer 1

Answer 2

A few reasons I can think of...

1. Not making it retroactive would be a pain to implement. And making the reputation system more fragile isn't something anyone wants.

2. Any sort of "grandfather" clause on this would just increase the discontent some new users feel regarding privileged old-timers.

3. Allowing users to keep their current rep until a recalc is run for some other reason would just increase the eventual shock. Even now, some users have never had a recalc, and their denormalized reputation is significantly different from what they should have (were deleted posts, etc. to be taken into account).

Better to just get it out of the way and deal with the fallout all at once.

Answer 3

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?
- Bill Watterson

Answer 4

Rep, rep, rep!!

Why is this so important? Did I miss something? Sometimes, it sounds like we are the natives of reputation underflow.

Whatever be the rule changes, they apply to one and all. People come to this site primarily to solve their problems, earning reputations is just a system in-place to encourage such behaviour.

Am I wrong? So why this silly hue and cry?

P.S.: sorry for outburst, but this rep thing brings the animal out in most of us.

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Update 1: @all: losing power to edit or do something may irk one, but rep can be gained, and all this is done to leverage all against some users who use faulty means to increase their rep.

Answer 5

As Jonathan Sampson has said:

Only one I can think of is that it gives an unfair disadvantage to those who join the system after the rep change.

I agree with this, as this would give an unfair disadvantage to people who join after the change. Why should you get the advantage of having all of your old upvotes be +10, when the next person only gets +5?

By making it retroactive, everyone is playing by the same rules, no matter what.

Answer 6

You know what programmers like?

Rules and rule based systems.

Yes, shows like surviver and biggest loser change the game rules every week, and all the participants act shocked and dismayed at the shifting ground.

But programmers like to know where they stand, and if the ground moves they expect the ground will shift equally for everyone.

In this case it doesn't. Those with a preponderance of questions will move far down the ladder, and those who focused less on questions will stay closer to where they were.

But this question of "fairness" is ludicrous. Define "fair" first, then we can determine whether this change is fair.

One thing that's certain is that Stackoverflow, as a rules based system, is not set in stone. Anyone who enters the game at any point should understand that changes are going to be made, and those changes will affect one, some, or all of the players.

Roll with the punches, focus on giving good answers to questions, and one really shouldn't have to worry about the occasional changes, even one as far reaching as this.

Quite frankly I'm surprised the rep system hasn't changed more since it came out of beta - balancing such systems is non-trivial.

Answer 7

Am I missing something or is everyone (that's ever asked a question) going to lose reputation points over this?

Just take a step back and look at what this means - the site's owners decided to take a bite out of every user's cheese-cake.

I get wanting to tweak the incentive system here; fine, whatever. But if you assume rep matter to people (and I believe SO is based on this assumption to a large degree) then how is this kind of decision to reduce everyone's rep going to make any user of the site happier?

When was the last time you saw a multi-million user system bitch-slap all of its users simultaneously like this? lol it's like waking up one day and see that your farm on farmville is fenced off and all your crops are failing because the Zynga people decided to discourage planting corn. retroactively! :) That's the sort of thing that you just don't do.

I get also that it's tricky to make the system backward compatible. But, guess what, tough luck. bw-compatibility is always tricky. That doesn't mean it's cool to set up a community, let people participate and enjoy themselves, gain reputation and brag about it with freaking iframe flare that publicizes SO and then take a chunk out of everyone's hard earned rep basically to save a few ifs in the codebase.

On a personal note, I haven't participated in a while and got here by following the recent blog post about this. The reason I'm not participating as much any more, incidentally, is that I honestly don't find enough "good" questions. If anything I would suggest increasing the value of a good question, not decreasing it... I would not suggest, however, to do so retroactively.

Answer 8

IMO you should never lose reputation retroactively. I played by the rules when I asked the question to gain the reputation - now it feels like I can't trust the rules anymore.

I just lost >25% of my rep because I mostly ask questions. But I have put a lot of effort into writing good questions, and feel that they are worth just as much as good answers. Even though I mainly ask questions to find answers to my problems it now feels like I've lost some of my motivation to write good questions. It's like they aren't valued - even though the questions are just as necessary as the answers to drive the community forward.

Also; you typically get a lot more upvotes on a good answer than a good question anyway.. There is e.g. almost 5 times more good answers than good questions.

If you want to change the rules - fine. But I don't find it fair to make the changes retroactive..

Answer 9

I think it's fair.

It may seem harsh now, but we'll get used to it like we did with the reputation cap (which was, by the way, retroactively applied, and that was a huge blow for some users)

Answer 10

I notice that this question glosses over the fact that the question-rep change was implemented at the same time as another significant change, which effectively raised the daily rep cap for users who received a lot of accepts/bounties (i.e. the users who actually provided the most help to others).

To claim that one change should been forward-only implies that all changes should have been forward-only, and I am fairly certain that those who were prone to receiving 200pt bounties or a half-dozen accept votes at 8 AM would disagree.

It would be interesting to see statistics on what percentage of users (especially high-rep users) actually lost rep as a result. The reams of questions being asked on MSO give an impression of widespread resentment which I think is misleading, because the group is self-selecting; few people are going to come to Meta to complain that their rep went up overnight. And I'm willing to wager that the vast majority of high-rep users, especially users over 10k, actually gained rep as a result of this change, because to get that high they generally would have had to provide a lot of good answers.

Several people are classifying this as a unilateral change to the rules, but to me, it's more like fixing a long-standing problem with the rep system. I'm not saying that people don't deserve anything for working to make their questions as clear and concise as possible, and neither is Jeff - the votes still count - just not for as much as they used to. This seems a lot more fair to the people who took their time to help other people, rather than ask for help.

What really makes SO shine, IMHO, is the quality of the answers, not the questions. Yes, there are some notable questions, but you can find questions anywhere. You can ask questions anywhere. What you can't do is expect a solid answer in 5 minutes. That's what's important on SO, that's the reason for asking a question in the first place, and that is precisely why the system should encourage people to craft good answers and reward good answers.

Question upvotes should never have been lumped in with answer upvotes in the first place. This should be reflected in the current rep scores, not just future ones. Part of the rationale for this change, as I understand it, was to reassess the "trust" of users who haven't demonstrated exceptional proficiency by virtue of their answers. Which is not to say that they aren't proficient; just that they haven't proven it.

So yes, applying the change retroactively is "fair." It is, in my opinion, making an unfair system fair. This may have inadvertently punished a small handful of users who were using their rep privileges effectively, but if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Besides, the debate over question rep is almost as old as the site itself. It's disingenuous to claim that you had no warning.

Answer 11

It's like the government having made a mistake calculating your taxes for the last little while. Just because they took a while to find the problem doesn't mean that you're now exempt on paying back the amount you're in arrears. You may not be charged interest, but that money wasn't yours, and you should give it back.

To grandfather the recalculation would defeat much of the point, which is to rebalance the site in favour of answers and away from Question Pumps.

Answer 12

To the idea of recalculating reputation I must advice Jeff & Co. to recall the modern history.

Currency denomination wherever it was introduced only pissed off the population and made a lot of good-living people poor in the blink of an eye. It also caused severe psychological trauma for many, which lost trust in their government.

It some sense, an online community is a microworld with its citizens, rules and sort of a government. The effects of denominating the reputation can also be serious. Consider psychological implications and the trust of your members. You say with enough reputation the site trusts you. Now people do not trust the site.

Answer 13

I agree with you. Here's what I wrote on the SO blog:

You know what’s funny to me? The trilogy sites work because people do care about their reputation. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t try so hard. So, with these changes, you took away something people care about. You can laugh and say it’s just a number that has no intrinsic value or tell people to get a life, but you undermine the very reason the trilogy sites have succeeded so dramatically. You are basically saying, “We know what makes you tick, now we are going to take it away and hope you get over it.” The correct move, as many have pointed out, is to change the point system going forward, not rob people of something they’ve worked hard to accumulate under a particular set of rules.

Answer 14

It's extremely frustrating to lose rep retroactively, when it was gained within the rules of the site. There should be grandfather rights for rep.

Answer 15

All those of you who are against or are whining about the reputation change, should play World of Warcraft, that’s where after one patch, your super ability gets a nerf and you feel disappointed. But WoW players are mainly kids.

I can’t believe people are actually complaining about something as trivial and virtual as a reputation number on stack overflow. If you want to have a higher number, answer the goddamn questions.

It takes time, but then again, getting a CS in computer science takes at least four years…

No big deal. Now go do some work and don’t use goto.

Answer 16

The way I see it, your 'reputation score' is a reflection of the value that Stack Overflow places on your contributions to the SO community. If, for some reason, what SO values happens to change, it stands to reason that your reputation score should change accordingly. It may go up, or it may go down. That's just the way life is.

Answer 17

I can't decide yet. It's hard to tell by just looking at your reputation gain/loss. I lost almost exactly 1K rep out of 8k pre-recalc, but considering that EVERYONE shifted the numbers have to be looked at as relative to the overall community. It is quite possible that despite losing a lot of rep, you gained ground on catching up to Mr. Skeet if your profile was more answer-heavy than question heavy.

Ultimately I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it seems unfair to change the rules midstream, however I do kinda agree with the logic behind the recalc even if it does hurt to see that number drop.

For those hard-core addicts out there that love to crunch SO data-dumps, I'd be interested to see some numbers on how the recalc affected the relative ranking of SO users by rep score. It would be far more interesting than the change in an arbitrary reputation number.