New users don't value reputation

Question

For a long while the issue of addressing how to prevent off topic or low quality questions has been looked at from multiple angles. I have tried many times to take part in these conversations.

At times there has been success in addressing the overall quality of the sites from these discussions such as the dupehammer and throttle banning conversations.

At times it ends up fruitless because of a few factors:

• Individual or social actions end up being crusades from a small group
• An automated solution can be hard to identify
• Retroactively closing these questions doesn't work because of the large amount of them

Here is a recent discussion we had on this topic at Meta Stack Overflow: Make it easier to close job shop "gimme teh codez" questions

Shog9 has taken part in these conversations and has said that the problem is one that can only be solved socially. However, from the janitor side (trusted users of the site) it is hard to socially fix this, because it isn't a problem with trusted users - it is a problem with the users posing the off-topic questions.

One route that I would like to consider for addressing this group of users, predominantly 1 reputation users, is making them value their reputation. A new user starts with a reputation of 1. Any action they take has no negative observable consequence to them. If they post and receive several downvotes they do not take the indicated loss that should accompany those downvotes. From a gamification sense (which is a large part of how this community works) this removes the incentive to avoid downvotes.

The incentive to avoid downvotes for new users needs to be returned. The best way to have users both invested in their reputation from day 1 and also motivated to avoid downvotes and losses to their reputation is to give them more than 1 when they start.

Starting them at a very low value which allows them to experience the loss of reputation due to downvotes will balance out the motivation to avoid posting questions or answers which will lose reputation. I believe that starting new users at 5 reputation will accomplish this while still avoiding giving them any privileges that could be abused by spammers or malicious intent.

While it may seem like a small amount, some users will comment how hard it was to get to 20 in order to chat. Losing 4 out of their 5 reputation due to downvotes on a question will immediately incentivize them to either fix or remove their post on their own, otherwise they will have lost 80% of their reputation in one fell swoop. Further, if they do remove the content causing this loss in reputation, it will make them even more content oriented in the future when posting so as to avoid the loss.

None of this is possible when users have 1 reputation to start with. They see no actual loss reflected from downvotes and therefore have no incentive to avoid them. From a social standpoint, it is impossible for the community to send any signal to these users that they need to improve their quality as a result.

In order to allow new users to be motivated to avoid a loss to reputation and also receive the signal from the community, they should start at 5 reputation. This will allow them to value their starting reputation by default without needing an intervention from an automated system or from direct community involvement.

Answer 1

From a gamification sense (which is a large part of how this community works) this removes the incentive to avoid down votes.

Not really. They'll see an increase (or decrease) in points, and they'll go crazy and scream to the world. I mean that literally.

Placing additional emphasis on the gamified attributes will quite simply hurt us if we are to get new, "smart" users in the long-term. These users won't care about reputation anyway, so what value will any of this have?

About users that run off, most of the time, I find that it's their question score, and not their reputation that drives them off. They see a negative value, and see people, in comments, yapping at them "Did you even try to search?", or even "What did you try?". It may be some level of quality control, but this is a consequence of that.

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The biggest social issue here is Trust.

Really.

When I first joined SO, I posted a couple questions that were positively received (i.e. Got 0 or 1 up votes, and no down votes) and I was fairly satisfied. I came across an answer that suggested I simply make a new script, and do this:

from tmsx import *
tms.load('whatever')
# carry on.

That surprised me, and I asked. I was told to simply go ask a new question. Before I did, I looked in the docs. I thought that there was a function that was actually called *. As a programmer who was just learning, I've never even heard of the concept of a "wildcard" import. I even searched SO. Here are the search results I get now:

• Decorators? What the hell is a decorator?
• Yield? What the heck is an iterator? I don't know anything about Python...

... You get the point. I simply didn't find anything that I thought would be relevant, and that would answer my question.

I didn't find an answer. So I asked. I linked back to my previous question.

Within 10 minutes, I had been slammed with nearly 10 down votes, and comments that were "Looks like you didn't even try to search." And comment answers with links to sections in the docs I thought were completely unaffected. No one seemed to even want to listen to me, and see how much I searched? I was upset, and I hated this. And I nearly left.

Thankfully, I flagged that, and voiced my anger, and the question was later deleted by a diamond moderator.

The biggest issue isn't really that new users care don't care about reputation, it's that we don't recognize and trust them enough so that we can reward them. That's what drives people off.

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I know this will get down voted to oblivion, but I think it's useful to see this side from it. Although we believe heavily in gamification, a new user will simply want an answer to his question, and most of them don't always have the interest to come back either.

Answer 2

The concern here seems to be focused on trying to save users who provide crap questions. But really, I'd want to focus on saving users who can provide good answers, as they're much harder to come across.

You've said that new users don't care about reputation. I tend to agree. I don't think this problem is solved by giving them 5, 10, 15, or 100 reputation to start with. They'll just create a new account and start again.

• Users are already warned when their questions are low quality. They're told that their questions are "not well received" and that continuing to ask these questions may result in a question ban. This happens very quickly.

• Ignoring these messages generally results in the question ban. This is automatic and cannot be removed by moderators. This can also happen very quickly, should the user ignore warnings.

• Trying to salvage these users is not a high priority - the ones who continue to ask low quality questions or post low quality answers despite these warnings, and despite comments from the community telling suggesting that they improve their questions, are generally those who aren't wanted - at all. (I say generally because I'm sure there are some exceptions.)

  Consider this comment on the Stack Overflow blog:

  As a questioner, I don't give a fig about reputation, nor about the ability to ask questions at some later date. All I care about is getting an answer to the question that I have right now. I don't care if I have to set up a proxy to get round a blocked IP (I could just switch my wireless off and on again to get a new one!), all I care about is getting an answer. So long as I can actually ask it, that's all I care about.

• We don't need to find a site for every single off-topic question that's asked - I think of these users as off-topic, and we don't need to save every one of them. Smaller sites might benefit from this, but it's nothing that can't be done through commenting on questions and answers, and suggesting how they can be improved.

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In my experience, from a community moderation perspective (as a trusted user and as a ♦ moderator on Law), the best way to reduce these users' impact on the community is to downvote them. This limits the question's visibility, and results in less attention given to these users. They stop getting answers, then they stop participating. Done.

In terms of closing and deleting these questions, there is already an automated process in place for deleting old questions.

Answer 3

The answer is 4, not 5.

A new user starts with a reputation of 1. Any action they take has no negative observable consequence to them. If they post and receive several downvotes they do not take the indicated loss that should accompany those downvotes. From a gamification sense (which is a large part of how this community works) this removes the incentive to avoid downvotes.

The incentive to avoid downvotes for new users needs to be returned. The best way to have users both invested in their reputation from day 1 and also motivated to avoid downvotes and losses to their reputation is to give them more than 1 when they start.

...

Losing 4 out of their 5 reputation due to downvotes on a question will immediately incentivize them to either fix or remove their post on their own, otherwise they will have ...

I have read:

• What is the significance of the initial rep of 1 on any stack exchange site?

• Reason for new user's reputation is set to 1

• Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead?

• How does "Reputation" work?

• and "Help Center > Privileges" for Meta, Stack Overflow, and other sites.

1. Giving new users a reputation of 1 as a starting or association bonus (when they don't have 200 reputation on any site) leaves them with nothing to lose; as you have explained.

2. Giving new users a reputation of 5 makes a change to how reputation and privileges work, a small one but one of some significance. That has also been explained, and voted against.

But, if we gave new users a reputation of four (or even two) then it would be a greater benefit for everyone, especially the established users. It's two to four times better for the new users, reputation wise, but it benefits the community too.

As it stands now if we see someone with 1 reputation we don't know what the story is without a little investigation. Maybe they are new, maybe they are suspended, maybe they have downvotes on the site; but how many?

If new users started with a reputation of four (which they may not: notice, care, understand) and received one downvote then they would have a reputation of two, another downvote and now they have one. If they received one upvote then they'd have a reputation of either 9 or 14.

Whichever way you slice it the privilege afforded to them wouldn't be changed, but we could easily see what the initial reception for their activity was. If someone has a reputation bonus of 100 (for being recognized on other sites) they can lose something if they are downvoted, and it shows, but someone with a reputation of one loses nothing and one must investigate their profile to determine if they have a bunch of downvotes - that's not a fair advantage compared to established users.

Giving new users a reputation of four (or two) is better than five, or one.

Answer 4

I like the idea of starting with a larger reputation pool so new users having something to lose. Unfortunately though, I think many of those users see no value in these Imaginary Internet Points. Most, like myself before I became a user, do not even know that there are rewards for having more points. To further incentivize these users, perhaps you should be able to lose some basic rights on the website for having a score lower than what you started with? This could mean that you lose the ability to ask questions once you've received a large number of downvotes.

Such a system would require means of getting those points back. Users should still be able to answer questions, but might not be knowledgeable enough to do so. Maybe once you've fallen your missing points will regenerate over time? Of course many people with too low a rep to ask questions will probably just make a new account.

To further "gamify" the system there could even be some sort of placement exam that dictates how much rep a user starts with. Maybe linking an active GitHub account or other service that proves a user's adequacy could also bolster that starting score.

In the end though, is anything like this necessary? I'm no moderator so I need not deal with the endless deluge but from my point of view as a regular user of the site I don't really feel like I'm drowning in poor content like I do on some of this site's competitors. I'm not saying nothing should be done or nothing will improve, but I also don't think we can look at this battle as something actually winnable.

Edit: It looks like you can already lose the ability to ask questions. In this case, these suggestions would only act as a method of more clearly displaying that downward spiral to users.