Overall reputation scores are headed nowhere but up. Pretty soon there will be thousands of mods. What to do? Thoughts on possibilities:
Implement a rep decay mechanism, so that inactivity sheds some of the overall rep that's built up.
I think this was discussed on some SO Podcast and was decided that it was a bad idea.
Thousands of mods is fine. Carry on.
I think this is the idea, the idea is not that mods should be limited but that the system trusts users after x reputation. If it trusts a lot of people then that is great.
Reputation is designed to make sure you are legit before you can start doing things. So for example, it keeps spammers out because you actually have to participate just a bit in order to start using the system.
At the higher levels, for moderator type privileges, reputation serves a slightly different role. It basically confirms that you've been here long enough that you know how things work AND that the community as a whole considers you an experienced participant. In that regard, it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with having a bunch of mods. The community itself will also be growing and those moderators will be needed because the activity on the site will also have gone up as well.
That being said, the best part of SO is the willingness of the team to change the rules for the better as this work in progress continues.
I disagree that this is even an issue. Millions(!) of mods is kind of the point. The idea is that the site(s) are run by the masses, not by an elite few.
Having users with ridiculous rep levels does not hinder a new person from gaining reputation except in the face of high-rep users commit fraudulent actions to keep someone down, and even for the highest level of moderator the damage that can be done is limited. This is all by design.
Now, if they introduce some PvP features whereby Jon Skeet can buy better post tools than me I may change my answer but until then, I don't see this as an issue.
It's a shame there's not also a measure of experience as well as trustworthiness. It's frustrating to take the time to construct a well thought out answer, get a couple of up-votes and then see lots of up-votes for questions like "In Java what's the difference between '=' and '=='?".
We now have more than
Everything is fine.
Carry on.
I agree a lot with what Olafur says about the mod count going up. There is a problem along the way though which was discussed for a time on Uservoice concerning some users who are seriously not up to the task of being an editor, but have still managed to achieve a rep score allowing them to be merely by posting hundreds of garbage questions which will almost always score some sympathy up votes along with the numerous down votes.
I still believe that there should be some sort of ratio between Asked vs. Answered (and perhaps a ratio concerning their number of high score questions/answers vs. negative score questions/answers) before certain moderation capabilities are bestowed upon a user. This would ensure that you are keeping the users who simply "don't get it" from getting extra power just for sticking with it long enough and overall lowering the quality of the system itself.
As rep grows with time it will be less useful for judging the reliability of an answer.
Joel (allegedly) knows a bit about Excel's macro language - but he has less rep than a kid who has nothing better to do than post on SO all day.
So you could have a world expert on a particular topic with a rep of a few hundred and posts by somebody who knows nothing and a rep of 10K+.
Are we going to have to show rep only related to answers with the same tags ?
Pretty soon there will be thousands of mods. What to do?
Yes, but pretty soon there will also be millions of low-rep users. In other words, for each person who crosses the 10k-rep threshold, there are dozens of new users asking questions on Stack Overflow for the first time. I would actually argue that the number of moderators is barely keeping up with the number of new users. I think that we need more moderators, not less.
In short,
Thousands of mods is fine. Carry on.
Implement a rep decay mechanism, so that inactivity sheds some of the overall rep that's built up.
I disagree with this. Decaying reputation points would only really effect people with low rep, not those with tens of thousands of rep.
You could have it decay logarithmically, so reputation decays faster the higher your rep, but a) this kind of punishes the active users most, b) reputation applies linearly, so if someone with 100k rep loses 1% a day, it takes much more effort for them to regain it.
One idea I had (although I don't think it'd really work in practice), is hiding reputation above a certain point
There will always be newbies to the site - I do hope. Therefore the inflation adjustment would not work. Otherwise I would get the same rep as some active newbie soon would have.
Maybe the boundaries for some of the operations, mainly the moderators will have to be adjusted over time (without anybody loosing his or her earned rights), but this is a trust site.
Maybe something like: You are granted mod rights
The second one could be used to grant mod rights on popular tags as well?
I think the rep system is fine. And I think pegging it to the ability to edit other people's posts is fine since a history is displayed. I think that pegging it to the mod panel will go down as a very very bad idea. Why? Well it's the kind of thing that can get abused in so many ways without anyone ever noticing. How well they will have access to your ip, your email, your real name (if you gave it). It's a very serious privacy issue that needs way more control than it's been given.
