The reputation system on Meta Stack Overflow is somewhat weird to understand

Question

After spending some time on Meta Stack Overflow, I realized the voting system here is completely different. The votes are used for agreement or disagreement toward the question/request and the answer itself instead of quality. However, by downvoting a post, it will also decrease one's reputation at the same time, which will result in a lost of privileges such as downvoting other's post. This behavior of the system seems to tie "how many people agree to you" and "what you can do" together. It is basically saying if many users do not agree to you, you will not be able to express your opinion and disagree with other's idea.

I don't see any logical relation between these two. Furthermore, on other Meta sites it will not affect both voter's and poster's reputation.

Voting up or down does not affect reputation. You are now free to vote purely based on post content, without worrying about how your vote might positively or negatively affect someone’s reputation score.

This makes sense because why on earth would reputation be tied with expressing opinion?

Jon Seigel in this post offered an "explanation" on why the rep system on meta SO shouldn't be changed:

... there is a penalty for downvoting, but you get upvoted more here, too, so you have more rep to work with.

This clearly does not explain why downvoting causes a decrease in reputation. In the Stack Exchange system, reputation is an numeric indicator of how trusty and experienced a user is. So does this mean a person with more people agreeing is way more "trusty" than another person with people disagree his questions even though it is a completely good question? Clearly there is something wrong with the system in meta SO, and I believe that it should be modified to remove the rep decrease when voted down, for both voter and poster.

Answer 1

Yep, Meta rep is somewhat confusing. And not in the last place because of how it's presented to you. You have an idea for the site, and start to receive downvotes. You check your question, which is well formulated, and see your rep drop.

Luckily one of our helpful users steps in and tells you "Don't worry about it. The downvotes just mean disagreement on Meta". Somewhat relieved you take a step back and then wonder "but why am I losing privileges?".

Granted, Meta is a bit of a weird experience, mashed into a Q&A format, where discussions are still accepted and feature requests can be disagreed with. It's a bit of a historical beast. But don't worry, in 6 to 8 weeks that will all be over.

So is voting a pure agree/disagree situation? No, it's not. There are bad questions, there are poorly researched ones, there are rants and there are all kinds of "regular" shortcomings a Meta question might have, that would justify a downvote without meaning "I disagree". And I don't have a problem with those coming with a reputation penalty.

You are right however when you say that this penalty feels a bit strange for something that is purely disagreement. Ideally one could/should prefer creating an actual answer instead of downvoting, but that admittedly doesn't always happen.

So then the whole connection between reputation and community trust is gone, right? Well, no, not really. In a Meta sense, if you consistently come up with good ideas for the site, which the community likes and would love to see, you have earned a bit of their trust. Yet if time and time again you propose things that nobody likes, you might have lost a bit of it. So even for agreement/disagreement votes, the whole connection to "how much the community trusts you" is not lost.

Is this site perfect? No. Can I understand that it's confusing from time to time? Sure. But overall it does its job. And losing privileges is never great. But having participated on Meta for as long as I have, I can't help but notice that the reputation in most cases will increase, and often with very little effort.

If there is ultimately going to be a big chance to Meta, I'd love to see what it will turn out to be. But until then, I don't really see a huge need to change things.

Answer 2

It's true. If you suggest an idea that the community doesn't like, you will lose reputation. (Or if you ask a lazy question that's been asked a lot before, or if you come and lecture volunteers about how they're not volunteering right, or many other kinds of "bad" questions that may not feel bad to the asker.) And if you don't have much of it at that point, you may lose hard-won privileges. The result of this, though it may not have been by design, is that newcomers who've just shown up tend not to make suggestions for ways to change the entire SE system in their first week. (Or let's say, they don't do it a second time in a hurry.) Once you have thousands of rep, you don't mind losing 10 so you're willing to make such suggestions.

I consider this to be a feature not a bug. Newcomers often breathlessly announce their discovery of brand new facts that are actually quite well known. "Hey, getting a downvote hurts my feelings! I should know who to be mad at!" or "I deserve a comment explaining a reason I can argue with!" or even "I should be able to ask a moderator to reverse it if my question or answer is actually good!" etc. Typically the wording implies that nobody else could ever have thought of or considered this before.

If worry about losing some rep makes people wait a while, this is good. They will discover that there is a balance, a yin and yang, a to and fro between the desire to make all the site users feel happy and welcome, and the desire to have only high quality material on the site. They discover that the rules were not made in ignorance of whatever it is the newcomers keep discovering, but in full knowledge of them, because a different rule would mean the site wouldn't be as good. They discover in some cases that whatever they're suggesting (downvoting a question should cost rep, question upvotes should be worth 10 like answer upvotes, etc) is how the site used to work, and it was changed on purpose. In short, they learn about the system before they try to change it, and that's a good thing.

The per site metas are not the place for "let's do away with vote anonymity" or "there shouldn't be a rep required to comment everywhere" to be handled. They are more for settling what is on topic or working out tags. Suggesting a bad tag idea shouldn't take away your privileges on those meta sites, and it doesn't. But this meta is not like all the others. Not at all.

Answer 3

I see one good reason for rep loss for downvotes here, imagine the vast number of additional pointless questions and requests and bug reports (etc) if there was nothing to be lost...

Also, downvotes here are still for the usual things such as poor grammar, bad question in general (separate to agree/disagree) etc.

It's known the current scenario is not ideal with the votes being for two separate things.
There are already many discussions relating to ideas changing the voting system mechanism and thoughts on how to utilise the current one differently.

There is also the fact rep affects privileges. So if you often suggest poor things rather than useful/worthy, then your rep will go down, and therefore your privileges will be low reflecting what you should be allowed to access.

Answer 4

If anything, it's just not clear to users what downvotes mean. I frequently explain "voting means agree/disagree" on other meta sites and frequently get "thanks, didn't realize that!" responses.

Also, just an observation, even on Meta here, a question needs to have 2.5x as many people downvote vs upvote to cause a net rep loss. On answers, it's 5x. So reputation still has a built in adjustment assuming ideas are even remotely positively accepted by the community.