How can we make SO reputation more realistic

Question

How can we make reputation a reflection of trust rather than how many ambiguous, argumentative, and general questions you can answer/ask before the mods notice?

Look at any high reputation person, yes they certainly answer a lot of questions very well, but if you look at the things that actually generate their badges and reputation I can guarantee that they're almost all questions that are generic, argumentative, or horribly subjective.

I realize that this is in itself probably in the category that I speak of. But I posted a question that I was actually passionate about but it was closed for being argumentative. People even continued to favorite it after it was closed but that doesn't matter really.

So what are the common thoughts about this? Does anyone even agree with me about this or is this just the rant of every newbie to the site?

Answer 1

Make rep earned from community wiki questions go away, even if the answer was there prior to its wikification.

Answer 2

Speak for yourself.

I've answered loads of questions that get either 15 rep or 25 rep. They're the hard ones to answer. Sometimes the OP is so low on rep that they can't upvote, so it's only worth 15.

Sometimes it's just a drive-by posting and the person never returns. That one's worth zippo.

I try to answer C# questions, but get Skeeted every time I try.

Any rep that I gain on the occasional question that I can FGITW that everyone happens to know the answer so they can upvote it, is payback for built-up karma from the table-scrap questions, as far as I'm concerned.

Answer 3

How can we make reputation a reflection of trust?

You can't.

Reputation only shows how much the community has upvoted a person's contributions to the site. Yes, questions that are subjective, argumentative, or close to being argumentative, are going to get more community voting than regular questions.

But rep does not, and cannot, mean anything more than that.

Just like real life, the celebrities that have a good bit of showmanship and know how to rouse the rabble are going to receive more attention in the community than everyone else.

There are exceptions, of course.

The real question is - why does it matter? Why should we change rep to mean something more substantial?

Reputation is NOTHING more than an INCENTIVE to contribute.

That's all it was ever meant to be - an artificial 'scoreboard' so people would always have some drive to contribute to the site without being paid for their work.

It does exactly what it's meant to do.

If you change how the scoreboard is measured, you fundamentally change the direction of the website and how people game it. This may or may not be a good thing, but the effect must be taken into account. The reality is that even if you change the metric to measure 'trust' it still have to measure things that can be gamed, and thus must necessarily become detached from 'trust' over time anyway.

Answer 4

Look at any high reputation person, yes they certainly answer a lot of questions very well, but if you look at the things that actually generate their badges and reputation I can guarantee that they're almost all questions that are generic, argumentative, or horribly subjective.

Please back this generic, argumentative, and horribly subjective statement up with some evidence.

Answer 5

Make people pay real money for answers. Oh, wait -- that's the other site.

Answer 6

Wow. Can we have a special badge for unsupported, sweeping, generalizations? One that comes with, oh, a rep of -500?

For a counterexample, feel free to look at my track record on so.com. I'm over 2k. My rep is disproportionately from a few popular answers to specific, not wildly obscure, technical, questions. I don't claim to understand why some of these answers piled up 10-15 votes. I'd hazard a generalization that relatively pithy, accurate, answers to medium-simple questions get rewarded -- perhaps because those questions are likely to be searched for over and over. But I don't really know what the voters were thinking.

I suppose that there are people out there farming rep on marginal, soon-to-be-Wiki questions.

I don't care.

The case in which I could imagine this mattering to anything except ego is if someone abuses the editorial powers gained from ill-gotten rep. Something tells me that this would lead pretty speedily to an account reset.

None of us are going to Valhalla based on our StackOverflow reps. A few might get job offers.

Best I can tell, most of us do this due to a compulsion to be helpful, a suspicion that others might return the favor when we get stuck, and, oh well, a bit of intellectual peacockery. But there's a big difference between strutting a bit and getting all hot and bothered over the legitimacy of other people's feathers.

Answer 7

Perhaps one answer is to delete the community wiki feature. It seems to me that anything that is a community wiki is almost guaranteed to be contentious or overly generic. Certainly it's something that doesn't have one answer. As it is CW made me think that making something CW would allow me to ask more generic questions like the one linked above, but that's not true at all.

But I also thought that according to the FAQ I wouldn't gain or lose rep by asking a CW question, this is also not true. That question is to this day both my highest rep gaining and highest rep losing post.