Would a user capping their own reputation at 99k have any user experience downsides?

Question

A comment roughly along the lines of "you're just posting this question to get rep" left me challenged how best to answer beyond "no I'm not." Of course rep does offer us some guidance about our posts since it comes primarily from community voting and so there isn't anything necessarily bad about asking a question that increases rep, even by users who ask questions to get rep of which I'm not one.

But I would like to "retire" my reputation at a symbolic 99k because that would:

• remove any doubt that my questions are asked for any other reason than to provide a place for great answers to be written
• serve as a reminder that reputation is not the be all and end all of our activity here

I wouldn't be surprised if others wouldn't also like this option, so it might be just a button that we choose on our profile; no matter what the current rep was it would no longer be displayed at higher than 99k, or maybe replaced with a static99,000 or 99,999 odometer-like symbol.

Personally I'd rather see reputation displayed as a base 10 logarithm, a bit like pH. So 500, 23,000 and 155,000 for example would be 2.7, 4.4 and 5.2 which still indicates rep to 10% accuracy but in a more calming way. I'd then opt for the 4.9 cap.

This is not yet an official feature request. Right now I'm just interested to find out if there could be any down side to this in terms of user experience.

Answer 1

Since this is hypothetical and not a feature request, personally (very subjective) I don't see any downsides if it's global. In fact it crossed my mind before.

After I passed 20k for all the perks, it's really pointless. To steal @Nij's comment:

(...) there's a massive difference between users with 100 rep and 500 rep on most sites, but no change at all between 99K and 499K (...)

I'm not big on the +10 notification (yay 0.01% increase, also Persistence of already viewed activity changes on the profile page). When rep-capped for a day (I'm also Legendary), I enjoy the site more.

But, what about the gratitude the users want to show? Here the badges come in.

The users can be sorted by badges after being capped at 20k, 99k, or whatever, for their continued efforts to the site. If the capping is elective (a user preference), then it introduces a problem with sorting the users' positive contributions.

Answer 2

Reputation is like money: you get it (ideally) as result of working and contributing, it let you do things you can't do otherwise, and for some it's fun to earn and stash.

Personally, I always want to know exactly how much money I have, not just estimation. Knowing how much other people have is also something I would like, though in real life it's not possible so here it's a nice bonus.

I do agree to some extent that having it displayed everywhere in the full form can be "too much", so I do support alternatives to the user card display, but not to cap the actual reputation or hide it everywhere.

Therefore, I'm against the idea of capping or hiding reputation, regardless of its amount.

As for choosing to cap/hide your own reputation, I'm not against the idea itself, but since it will require much more development time I prefer the developers will spend their time on other things, so I'd also vote against it.

Answer 3

Past 30k, there's no additional privileges for users. Its just a number.

I know of one user on a smaller site, who found having 100k unbearably boring, got a second account, and got it up to 100k as well.

On the other hand, outside the obvious - some folks play for the score. I'd love to hit 100k, even if there's no more swag for it (😟), and I keep my eyes on the legendary - Its a nice large number, it adds a full digit to the counter. Its a visible, and fairly tangible minestone. Hiding it seems to be premature.

Maybe at about a million....

Answer 4

Comments below the question propose (1, 2) the existence of people who strongly focus on maximizing their reputation points. These users, if they exist, might find the existence of users without a precise displayed reputation troubling, because they could not easily tell if those users had more reputation than they did or not.

This situation might be frustrating to said users and their reasons for focusing on maximizing reputation above all else.

Whether that should be considered a bad thing or not is debatable.

Answer 5

Your problem seems to me to have a different solution

A comment roughly along the lines of "you're just posting this question to get rep" left me challenged how best to answer beyond "no I'm not."

There's no reason to reply in such a manner. (As tempting as it is, yeah, I get that). ;)

Report that user to the mods (flag the comment) for a violation of the Be Nice policy. What they are doing is being hostile for no good reason. One of the tenets of "Be Nice" is to assume good faith. That person was being snarky, and willfully asserting bad faith on your part when you had shown none.

This was a challenge to the frame of the question. I believe that the tool to address that problem is not rep hiding, but getting that user's behavior some mod attention and perhaps a quiet word from a diamond about being a better citizen of the Stackverse.