#The problem
@tchrist recently asked this question: Proposal to make close votes scale with rep
While I completely agree with the sentiment, I wholeheartedly disagree with the solution.
As one of the more active close voters on Stack Overflow and a top five close voter on Programmers.SE (in the last 6 months, anyway), I disagree with any solution centered around enabling and encouraging the most active users to do even more work. I already do plenty, and I'm going to keep doing plenty for now, and so does everyone else at my activity level in these queues. In the words of someone who's done way more reviews than me:
I can't judge for other sites but on SO the major problem is not the number of close votes per user, but the number of users that use their close votes. I will support any proposal that fixes that behavioral issue but if you only expect me to spend even more time handling that flood of crap I don't see how this would really help. – rene 59 mins ago
##My Proposal
Reputation already has weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and all time leagues. We should have the same thing for review queues.
I know I'll never be able to compete with the likes of @rene and @andrewsi on Stack Overflow for all time reviews, the same way I'll never be able to compete with @JonSkeet in reputation, but I might be able to beat them in a recent, short term basis. Maybe I and others might find that fun, and gives a reason to keep playing even after 1000 review tasks. We need to find reasons to get more people participating.
I expect people to say that this is pointless, because so many people cap every day that it doesn't matter. My response:
- Actually, even the top reviewers don't cap every day, just most days. Okay, maybe @andrewsi does, but not all of them.
- We could also somehow include a scoring system for reviews that wouldn't really have any consequences, but might affect your leaderboard score. For example, you'd only score points for matching the ultimate fate of the post.
- I'm aware this would need some tweaking, but it could be a good test case for other similar proposals to see if these stats have any value
I also expect people to say that this proposal really only has meaning for the largest sites, to which I say that this is true; certainly enhanced leaderboards for review tasks would be for graduated sites only, as it would not likely have much meaning on betas. But I don't see how it would add much harm either, and it could only potentially add some fun for people who are interested in that sort of thing.
###Addressing Other Not-A-Solutions
One idea I and others have kicked around for some time is platinum badges, but ultimately that has the same problem as gold badges do; people get their badge and then stop participating. We need a mechanism that keeps people playing the game.
Similarly, people have kicked around giving reputation benefits for reviews; that's not something we want to do either; giving reputation for repetitive tasks could just encourage robo reviewers without actually increasing the quality of the reviews in any way.
