When is high reputation too high?

Question

Stack Overflow is maturing very nicely. As many people are saying in a recent thread there are numerous good reasons for us all to be here and we're making the most of it.

A few moments ago there were 1013 pages of users, which means somewhere in excess of 28 thousand registered users (although over half haven't actively contributed and are still on just a single point).

The nature of the reputation points is seriously inflationary, assuming that you shy away from making blatantly inflammatory statements and voting down lots of posts, there is no way to both actively contribute and keep your points tally down. In recent podcasts have hinted at the bounty system coming along soon which confronts in part this problem.

And I do think it's a problem. There are now more than 20 users with over 10,000 points. To me that's no longer meaningful. Yes some of them are very good in their fields, but all it shows is that they spend more time here than most! And what is the difference between a user with 5, 8, 12 or 20 thousand points?

Over time, points that just stack up will cease to be useful. Would this be the eponymous Stack Overflow?

Is reputation at that level meaningful? Is the fact that some of these leviathons have 100 bronze badges at all interesting? - or is it actually more interesting? The marginal pleasure of getting those early badges and tripping the various benchmarks to unlock functionality is long gone.

Do these huge totals mean a mature system or that the Gods will leave to find another game? What drives the 10k+ clique to continue?

Answer 1

I've wondered about "reputation inflation" too. Perhaps Joel and Jeff have a West Wing-esque secret plan to fight inflation. It's hard to know exactly what to do about it though. We could all drop 1% of reputation each day - but that's really just feeding the MMORPG "must keep playing" game.

The key question is: what is the intended purpose of reputation?

If it's meant to show that the system trusts you, then that's fine - we get more and more users that the system trusts, because they've earned that trust from the community. No problem.

If it's meant to show that a user has helped a bunch of folks, then that's also still true of high-rep users, even if it's mostly due to them being here a long time.

If it's meant to show that their answers are always correct, then obviously it fails. If you guess at answers and are right (and upvoted appropriately) a quarter of the time - a pretty poor record, really - then you'll still gain reputation on average.

If it's really just meant to keep people coming back to the site, then that's a bit sad.

As for whether high-rep users will leave - I was mostly active on NNTP newsgroups before I came to StackOverflow. There was no reputation system there beyond the normal one of the community getting to know you and trust you. That didn't make me leave... (and I still post there now). Why do I do that? Because I like helping people. I won't pretend that's purely altruistic - it gives me a buzz to know that I've helped people, and obviously the recognition aspect is nice too. I suspect the same is probably true for most other high-rep users. If we didn't like helping people, we wouldn't be here. (I don't think you'll find many high-rep users with as many questions as answers.)

Answer 2

I have this request in UserVoice since a lot of time. No one voted. That would be great to have more "action" to do. Moderation is hard sometime (lack of privileges) and we could do a lot more to help this website with more access to some features.

What drive me? I like to help of course and I like to try to keep getting the 200 limits every day, This kind of motivate me to learn thing that I do not know. Some day it takes 1 hours, some time it takes to whole day depend of the question and how many works I have. Since stackoverflow I am less tending to waste time on Digg or other website that doesn't give me something (knowledge).

But, Stackoverflow shouldn't penalize higher reputation with "tax" or something to slow down them. What is the point to penalize very active contributor? They are a lot of room for improvement to add functionality for them. They could be able to change to "Community Wiki" question that should be as it. They should be able to have a higher close power that only these range can re-open and not people too low (example someone over 10k close a thread, someone below 10k cannot reopen... this will reduce war of open-close). They should be able to restore comments if deleted. All these new privileges should be at 8k, 10k, 15k, 20k, etc

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Update: If you check the top 20 of 2 months ago and the same top 20 now, you can see a lot of people that aren't any more. Most of top user are now at the second page or near of it... and pretty inactive when before they were like Justin Standard and many other. A lot of super-active user became not active after reaching all objectives. Theses 2 graphics below are a lot common:

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I think it's no a coincidence that people stop being active, they do not care anymore to get some reputation or help if they do not get something.

Answer 3

I think that average upvotes per question and answer might be a better metric. That way we can really see if someone is consistantly posting good answers/questions or if they simply do spend more time on here and have a billion +1 upvote answers.

From looking at the 10k+ crowd right now though, most of them do seem to have a really high upvote average on both questions and answers.

Answer 4

Inflation sucks. Neither monetary nor fiscal policy will help so here are a few things that could:

• Weighting There could be some kind of weighting to make the reputation model less linear. So for example if you received a "right answer" to a "trivial" question you should receive less reputation than for a "non-trivial" question. Perhaps reputation could be be a function of views AND up/down votes AND favourites for a question etc.

• Capping Limit the amount of reputation you can gain from a single question / answer. Because ONE super question / answer doesn't make you a guru (well not in my book).

• Time linked deflation / depreciation Another slightly bolder idea might be to do some time related deflation to decrease "reputation" acquired from old questions as time progresses. It would also encourage users to be more active, and not rest on the back of their previous work :D and also has some real world significance which I will try to explain at a later date :D

At the moment it is something like this:

Users gain reputation when:

• Your Question or Answer is voted Helpful: +10 reputation
• Your Answer is marked Accepted: +15 reputation
• You Marked an answer to your question as Accepted: +2 reputation
• A down vote on your Question or Answers is removed: +2 reputation
• You remove vote from a Question or Answer you have votes as Not Helpful: +1 reputation

Users lose reputation when:

• Your Question or Answers is voted Not Helpful: -2 reputation
• You voted a Question or Answer as Not Helpful: -1 reputation
• You wrote the latest revision to a post flagged Offensive 5 times: -100 reputation
• A user removes a vote on your Question or Answer that they previously voted as Helpful: -10 reputation
• You have multiple user accounts merged. Reputation is recalculated during the merge so you lose reputation gained from questions that have since been deleted.

Additionally:

• All users start with 1 reputation.
• A user's reputation may not drop below 1.
• A maximum of +200 reputation may be gained per day from voting. (A new day starts 0:00 UTC). Users who have reached the 200 rep limit in a certain day may still earn rep from having one of his or her answers accepted, canceling previous downvotes, and accepting other peoples answers to their questions.

source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/303954/how-to-get-over-200-reputations-every-day

Answer 5

If you contribute only for the reputation, you will be bored if you are number one with a great margin (more than 2 k).

But if you are here to help building a great site. It is just a number. (And if it is 3k+, you can do anything that is needed).

Answer 6

The same as money - you just want to have more? :)

Answer 7

What drives the 10k+ clique to continue?

Prestige

Answer 8

And what is the difference between a user with 5, 8, 12 or 20 thousand points?

They've likely helped more people?

Answer 9

At the moment, answering popular non-tech questions with a thoughtful answer seems to be a way to gain a lot of rep. That's cool, but it doesn't mean that the person actually has expertise in any field.

It would be good to see some kind of "expertise" reputation as well. I'm thinking that questions and answers could also be up or down voted in terms of technical difficulty or knowledge. That could be used to build a technical rep.

Answer 10

Tagging on to Simucal's answer, maybe two metrics. I know on eBay, raw reputation tells me someone has been around, which is a good thing to know. But the percentage is all I really look at before a sale, and having a lot of high upvote answers could show something significant. Better than a user who never answers anything anymore to avoid blemishing their perfect average.

Answer 11

I certainly can't speak for the rest of the 10k club, but as for myself, I keep going in the spirit of teaching and learning, and trying to add new information to Stack Overflow.

I do keep an eye on my reputation, but only as a gauge of how my recent questions and answers are being received. It wouldn't really matter if it were 10,000 or 2,000 since it's really only the last few digits that tell me what I need to know.

Answer 12

What is reputation for? That seems to be a key question. A common complaint is that too much comes from too easy questions. Several people have suggested expertise or tag based reputation to highlight technical scores, that was certainly the solution I was toying with as I wrote the original question.

I've made a uservoice suggestion along these lines.

Answer 13

I think having a 'K' somewhere in the points means that either you are an expert in one or more disciplines (likely) or that you always have one window open and reserved for SO. Either way I do not think that it diminishes the idea behind this forum. And remember there's always 'M' and 'G' after 'K':)

Answer 14

It's too high when you're Donald Knuth.

Until then, keep at it.

Answer 15

As Jon, Bill, etc say - there is a lot of benefit etc from mutual learning. I first started contributing on usenet forums, and I learnt huge amounts from reading the replies on things new to me, and simply trying things... "how do I do x?" - dunno, but I can do y... is that any similar? etc.

It is also a good way (alongside blogs, etc) to keep up to date on things... if something new comes out, somebody will be asking about it.

Answer 16

I just wrote an answer to one of Jeff's questions that he deleted whilst I was writing the answer, but this is a pretty similar question.

I think the comparison to MMORPGs is appropriate. There needs to be a good leveling system. Rep could be like experience, and you need more and more of it to get to higher and higher levels.

Or you could have different stats, like helpfulness and accuracy. That way you tell the difference between someone with a low score who always gets the answer right, and someone with a high score who only gets it right 25% of the time.

Answer 17

For arguments sake: What would the negative impact be if reputation was hidden after you get to the ability-to-close-question threshold? It could be visible to that user, but not displayed else where.

Why? (Again, remember this is just for arguments sake) The system is misleading.. Given two answers, one from someone with x-thousand rep, one from someone with 2 rep - both answers can be equally good or bad, the rep-points of that user should be utterly irrelevant. In reality, people are more likely to accept or up-vote the answer from the higher-rep'd person, when really the goal should be to encourage new(er) users.

Not-displaying a users rep over a certain limit would, in theory, work just as well - the best answers get upvoted, the bad ones don't.