What's to stop someone from selling their reputation?

Question

What's to stop someone from selling Reputation (or their entire account) on a virtual currency auction site? In terms of Rep, a seller could offer 500 Rep and then easily transfer it to the buyer through a Bounty, could they not?

Indeed, people are already searching for ways to do this:

Obviously many people don't consider Rep to be worth money, but I'm sure somebody does. How can Stack Exchange sites prevent this from ever becoming a reality?

Edit: At least one user was approached to do just this a year before this question was asked.

Answer 1

that there's nothing really stopping someone from selling Reputation on a site like eBay

Sure there is, eBay explicitly doesn't allow this.

Besides that, I think this is a theoretical problem. If it ever happened, we have plenty of tools to deal with the account afterwards.

Answer 2

The community will take care of that by itself.

Reputation is just a number that represents what you have done so far on Stack Overflow. IMO, it is only important when it comes to privileges you unlock along the way. Other than that, it's just a number.

• I would not accept an answer simply because the user has a lot of rep.
• I would not answer a question simply because the user has a lot of rep.

So why would someone buy reputation? The only notoriety you can have here is by showing of your acquired badges which are, in some cases, pretty impressive but that's all there is to notoriety on SO.

tl;dr

Hey I just paid $200 for 500k rep. Now what?

Answer 3

A bounty still requires a decent post to award it to. Sure, someone could award a bounty of a considerable amount of rep to utter drivel. But with the community we have, it is unlikely that nobody would notice. In fact, bounties were designed to be highly visible.

So while it would technically be possible to sell your rep (or part of it) and award it to a user, I hardly think it's a practical concern.

Answer 4

Say that a potential employer wants to base their hiring decision on your StackOverflow reputation. If they even bother with just a little bit of investigation, they really only need to look at your reputation history. It wouldn't be too difficult to see through the sham, because a huge spike in rep, +500 at a time, in a relatively short period of time would be blatantly obvious.

If I were that employer, I would definitely remove you from the running. Or, maybe hire you if I needed a charlatan.

Answer 5

To have an ongoing business selling Stack Exchange reputation one has to have drum roll
a high reputation on the site.

For the purposes of my answer, I am going to refer to the Stack Exchange site Stack Overflow, as this is the Meta Stack Overflow site ;-)

Now this presents the following problems:

1. To achieve this, one has to be dedicated to spending time asking and answering questions on drumroll
   programming

2. The person has to have a reasonable knowledge about drumroll
   programming

3. People interested in programming are usually pedantic and often literal. So the rep is a useful tool to monitor one's own progress (until it grows boring ;-)).

4. A person capable of writing good answers to questions, would be capable of answering genuine bounties and earning there own reputation. Given this:

   The rep vendor is going to also have to provide a suitable answer to the buyer. to purchase such rep would be able to provide a good answer.

5. To create interesting and unique (as in not duplicate) questions and answers the rep vendor is going to to need a good knowledge base of at least one programming language. Making the following more likely:

   Any person with a reasonable knowledge about programming, is capable of making money through fair means or foul. (and yes, I do understand this is open to debate)

6. I do realise I waved the this is Meta Stack Overflow banner.. so this is not How to Make Money Exchange and I am no expert on either site (real or imaginary) ....[actually - must go to Area 51 and propose new Stack Exchange site ;-) ] ... I have posted the following question, but I suspect, if there are viable answers, that this would be a very poor way to make money.

7. Let's say (and I'm being generous) 500 rep goes for $100. You are going to have to be working pretty hard on the site to keep getting enough rep to create bounties. So let's calculate an hourly rate some time down the track.

I am not going to reiterate the other valid points made in answers here, as to the sites mechanisms to catch spurious user behaviour.
Suffice to say a user making a living from doing this, would require that many URLS, and phony SO accounts, with so much activity to avoid detection...... (that hourly rate is seriously dropping)

Soooooooooo drumroll In answer to your questions:

How can SE sites prevent this from ever becoming a reality?

I really don't think SE sites need to prevent this from becoming a reality ;-)

A Seller could offer 500 Rep and then easily transfer it to the buyer through a Bounty. Right?

Yes they could, now:

My ebay receipt number is ##@#$###%##8##!

Give me my 500 rep ;-)

Wow, can't wait to become next moderator!!!!

edit
Already fishing for potential buyers ;-)

Answer 6

And, further, how practical would this be?

You can only give bounties up to 500 points. Anyone who has been here for any length of time isn't going to find 500 points all that helpful, so only someone brand new would want it. And what does that give you? The ability to re-tag questions? Someone would pay money for that? Well, maybe, but enough to make it worthwhile for the "seller"? I doubt it.

Answer 7

What's to stop someone from selling their reputation?

How about common sense...

The points don't matter

Why pay money for something that you could otherwise get for free?

The only real value that rep has beyond opening features on the site is a sense that the community trusts you a little more (not much, but a little) and an ego boost. Neither of the latter two reasons would be met with purchased rep.

More or less purchasing rep would be a bit like intentionally purchasing botched plastic surgery, you would be laughed at by the community you were trying to impress.

And don't think people wouldn't find out, with 2.2 million users on SO alone the chances of posting a rep sale anywhere on the net and getting away with it are pretty slim.

---

Migrated from comments, because I thought it was a good question.

What about the privileges? 10k to one person may not be the best trade, but 50 rep to 200 people each looks like a great deal for 200 spammers, and you don't even lose the rep you're selling.
– Jan Dvorak

You would face a basic black market marketing issue: How do you at the same time advertise that you're in business and remain hidden? Selling smaller amounts of rep to more customers means more exposure and a higher risk of getting caught, which eventually leads to a higher price as the risk reward ratio gets skewed, but customers aren't likely to be willing to pay a higher price, as rep is otherwise freely available.

Some market forces still apply in a black market.

Answer 8

Why would someone want to buy reputation in the first place? There's no practical benefit from it. Yes, you can close questions and make tag wiki edits - but it's something else than being able to kill orc boss. The lack of people wanting to buy something is a great factor stopping you to sell it.

Second, the mechanism you've described is very highly inefficient. Someone would have to earn 500 reputation first, in order to be able to award it as a bounty. Then that reputation would be lost. It would be more rational to sell upvotes, since no reputation is lost. Honestly, I see so many low-effort questions (mostly I-don't-understand-this-Java-code-I-know-only-PHP question - no offence, I'm just using PHP as an example) that I don't think someone would mention.

Third, buying reputation would be like buying spam articles from spam generator. People don't buy that, they make it themselves.

Fourth, every advertisement on the internet leaves traces. It's easier to send a private message to your friend on Facebook to give you some upvotes. And only NSA will know.

edit

I think it would be much more viable to sell good questions and answers. Just like people write blog articles for money.

Answer 9

The only thing stopping someone from selling their reputation is if the price isn't right.

Like most other tangible things in life you can put a price on a reputation point, it will probably be a function of the amount of time it takes to generate said rep point and the monetary or emotional value (translated to monetary value) each point carries.

I don't see anyway I won't sell my rep for say, 100$ a point. I got a wife and a dog¹ to feed!

But there is a bigger issue, Who in her right mind will pay for rep?

reputation has no monetary value!

there is nothing to gain from rep points.

1:

Answer 10

My two cents:

1. 500 rep points doesn't get you a lot these days. The only really important place you don't want this corruption is with moderators. But then you need multiple 10K reputation points, years of activity and mostly experience and proved ability in editing and moderating.

2. Repeated bounties for no real reason will start to raise flags on that user, and with a justified flag nothing matters. I've witnessed high rep users (with gold badges, etc.) getting suspended very quickly for foul play.

3. For the case of a theoretical potential employer, I doubt reputation is what they'll look upon. Sure you need it, but then the important thing is: was it gain by very many, but simple answers? Or by significant impact answers and brilliance?

Answer 11

Counterpoint: If a marketplace existed for Reputation, it could render it more meaningful and improve all Stack Exchange sites.

Right now reputation points are used as a measure of experience, contribution, and commitment. But beyond that they have no value. Once you're a Trusted User what incentive do you have to accumulate rep, other than whatever value your own ego places next to that number? I have seen examples of formerly invaluable users sort of check out once their rep was past the mid-5-figures.

If a financial market existed for rep then the most valuable users (i.e., those who can provide the best questions and answers) would have some incentive beyond the "gaming" aspects to continue participating. So that's the supply side.

On the demand side: Who would pay for rep? Obviously somebody who really wants attention to a question, but can't or won't invest the time to try to build their own rep natively.

Would it be bad if somebody could pay for a 500-point bounty on their question? It would give it more eyes, and it might give it more answers, but it's not like it would pollute the ecosystem with bad questions: the question is still subject to votes, which are democratic and (we try to ensure) can't be bought with money. Bad questions will still accumulate votes that indicate their merit – and more quickly if they have a bounty.

Would it be bad if somebody bought Trusted User status and then started mucking about in the review queues? Sure, but that's why we have mods and CMs who can take away that status as easily as it was purchased.