Meta's logic is different to SO, so should reputation work differently?

Question

Just an example:

When we talk about SO, I agree with the reasons stated here to explain why question upvotes grant only +5 rep instead of +10, but Meta is different:

1.- Answers have more intrinsic value than questions, and the reputation balance should reflect that.

On Meta, in cases like posting a bug, suggesting improvements or proposing new features, the question itself is IMHO much more important than the answers, especially if it's upvoted, as Meta's voting logic is different to SO, and almost every upvote to a question means a user agrees with the OP.

2.- The question asker already enjoys a substantial benefit beyond reputation gain from upvotes on their question — namely, they get great answers to their question!

On Meta, especially in the cases stated before, answers don't solve an asker's problem, but a site problem or a possible improvement, so this point is not true, or not as true as it is in SO.

3.- We want to discourage question asking a little bit, and make sure that people who ask questions are doing it for the right reasons and not to generate reputation.

I think this point fits to SO but not completely to Meta. Asking something in Meta, especially proposing an improvement or requesting a feature can be a risky business (for your rep). IMO, these type of questions (and bug detection) should be encouraged (similar to creating a non-stop brainstorming).

Conclusion:

I'm not sure if this is possible or if it would be a headache for SE developers but IMHO, just in Meta, upvotes to questions should gain the same rep than answers. And more generally, reputation should work differently on Meta.

Answer 1

Meh.

Rep isn't that important. It's a rough measure of trust; of how much experience you have with the community. A rough measure. Tweaking the specifics is not really worth it; what will you do with the extra meta rep? The "extrinsic motivation" feature of rep doesn't really matter on meta. And, finally, the privileges bit is well covered, we have no particular need for an increase in the rate of accumulation of privileges (Of course, we need a steady increase in high rep users as the activity increases, but it's at a good balance now)

This feature request isn't bad, per se, but there's nothing great to it either. The feature is neither harmful nor useful (to me), why waste the dev time on it?

Answer 2

I have a suggestion concerting downvotes on Meta: Since, on Meta, a downvote simply means that you're disagreeing with the question or answer, I don't see any reason for discouraging downvotes by making them cost rep to the voter. I suggest that downvotes on Meta should not cost anything, whether on answers or questions.

Answer 3

This is an interesting proposition, mainly because Meta.StackOverflow is the catch-all meta.

The Meta sites for the rest on the SE network don't count reputation at all, and the reputation they do show is what has been accumulated from the main site.

Yeah but reputation on a Meta site is worthless!!

Not always. IMVHO it becomes important for anyone who is a candidate for site moderator elections. In this case it gives a representation of the candidate's input to the site, i.e. how many useful feature requests, discussions or bugs they have raised, and how many useful answers they have given to other users of the site. At the moment this contribution can only be measured on the Meta.SO site.

But wait.... there's an alternative...

We change Meta.SO to work the same way as every other Meta site (i.e. not accumulate reputation). Then at particular moments in time (i.e elections) the site devs can surface reports that show a user's level of contribution and assign arbitrary values to the up/down votes in order to show a general positive or negative influence.

This has the advantages of:

• bringing the main Meta into line with all the others, even though it's still the catch-all
• eliminates confusion about why Meta.SO is "different"
• still allows us to gauge someone's contribution to any meta site
• nobody ever needs to post the obligatory "Meta.SO works differently..." comment when a new user posts a question/suggestion that is heavily down voted
• [this space left for others to post advantages when they think of them]