A cap on reputation from a single answer (not daily, but forever)? [duplicate]

Question

I have seen this question before, but it seems to be talking about the daily cap.

The idea came to me when I saw this profile. This is one guy who has only 1 answer (and 1 score 4 question) and 5k reputation. The reason being the fact that he has answered a question viewed by many people.

I believe this example shows there is something wrong with the scoring system. After all, by this single one-paragraph answer you cannot tell the person is an expert or has rights to edit questions and answers or approve tag wiki edits, or that he is one of the top 7% of all stackoverflow!

One way that seems to me that can address the problem is to limit the amount of reputation one can get from any of his answers and perhaps also questions. This is not a daily cap, but a forever cap. I'd say 200 for the answers and 100 for questions should be good, which correspond to 20 votes each. I believe an answer that gets 20 up-votes is a good answer and any number above that is just a matter of how often people have that question, not how great the answer is. Nevertheless, there are badges for answers with really high scores that still reward the answer, but don't give him unnecessary rights.

Note: I'm not trying to reduce other people's reputation. I'm trying to address the problems that arise since everything in the system depends on reputation.

Answer 1

I agree with your sentiments about gaining editing privileges after only answering one question, but I disagree completely with your proposed way of fixing it.

First of all, is this really a problem? Are there users with edit privileges gained from one or two questions/answers running around editing stuff and doing a bad job of it? Are we looking to fix a problem that doesn't exist?

If someone lays down a great question or answer that continues to accrue votes, then good on them - they should not be penalized for that. We want great questions and answers, and moving to a form of communism whereby we stop awarding rep to a user because they already have "enough" feels totally wrong to me. Additionally, we shouldn't be in a position of asking "How much rep is too much?".

The edit privilege was set at a certain rep point to give people incentive and reward for attaining reputation. If this is a problem then possibly the best way to handle this is to require:

• a certain number of approved edit suggestions

  OR

• a certain minimum number of answers and/or questions, possibly even a certain ratio of questions/answers

Answer 2

Yes, I realize this is an old question, but since it's in the recently active list. . .

I keep seeing mention of a "problem", but no practical examples. As I understand it, the concern is the possibility of these lottery-winning mono-question users running rampant through the edit queues and calling down plagues of locusts o'er the land. This is a fine concern. We all want to keep the site clean and avoid vandalism. But I think the issues are being exaggerated.

First, where are the actual, real problems? Which mono-question users are actually running rampant? I'm all for fixing problems if there are actual problems to be fixed, but you provide no examples of practical impacts. Given that you're posting on MSO, it's fair to assume that you know how development priorities work. Potential problems go to the back of the queue, to be worked on when immediate problems are finished, or when they become immediate problems.

Second, if it's not about actual damage to the site, but just about a number next to someone's name, why do you care? A sense of outraged justice? A tingling sense that all is not right with the world? Yes, reputation can be considered a vague indicator of someone's theoretical ability with some form of technology or other. But what about situations like Remyabel? He's clearly a top C++ user if you take the time to go look at his profile. Yet from a casual glance at his reputation number, you wouldn't guess. (Note for posterity: Remy has 612 total rep as of this post's writing, due to 6,200 worth of bounties given away.)

Third, your statement about "everything depends on reputation" is flawed. For an example, one need only look at all the MSO grumbling about robo-reviewers. Those robo-reviewers, by and large, are people who received their reputation from more than one answer. But those multiple answers didn't prevent them being precisely the sort of problem you are concerned about.

Basically (and this isn't intended to be offensive, merely a statement of fact) it looks to me as though you're searching for a problem where there really isn't one, simply because you want a near-meaningless number to be "fair". If this particular user isn't doing anything to capitalize on his lottery reputation, the system is working as intended. (Or at least for a given value of intended.) And he's not. Look at his activity tab. In no way is he being abusive.

I would guess that Stack Exchange is not willing to invest valuable developer time in fixing an extreme edge case that is currently doing nobody any actual harm.

Answer 3

My take on this: The clue is in the word "reputation". Your rep score is based (mainly) on the number of people who found your answers useful. And to me, that sums up what the word 'reputation' means. If an answer is useful to hundreds of people, then that is worthy of having a good reputation. That's kinda the whole point.

I think your issue of him having edit rights is unlikely to be a real issue. The user in question hasn't even visited SO for the best part of a year, much less done any editing, so what rights he may have are somewhat irrelevant. Even if a user in this position is editing things, it's still only a problem if he's actively abusing it. And that would probably be picked up and stamped on fairly quickly anyway.

Also, you take issue with him being in the top 7% of Stack Overflow, but frankly, being in the "top x% of Stack Overflow" is a completely meaninless stat.

There are vast quantities of one-time visitors with less than 20 rep who registered just to ask a single question and will never come back to the site. They massively skew that percentage figure -- anyone with any rep at all will get farly high on that percentage. So really I wouldn't pay any attention to that figure if I were you. Change the stat to "top x% of active users", and you'll have a completely different perspective.