Propose a new 20k reputation privilege [closed]

Question

Right now, the maximum privilege "unlock" is at 10k reputation:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/privileges

We're considering adding a new 20k reputation privilege, but having a hard time figuring out exactly what it should be.

Two guidelines:

1. I would like it to be more than cosmetic -- I'd prefer to add a new and useful privilege that gives people actual power to effect more change on the site they have invested so much time in.
2. It would also be clever, though by no means required, if the privilege scaled so the more reputation you get above 20k, the more potent this hypothetical privilege is. Although this could be risky and even dangerous, so be careful and think through the consequences of what you're proposing.

Let's hear it -- please propose a new 20k reputation privilege, ideally meeting at least one of the guidelines above!

Answer 1

Vote to delete answers. There is a constant stream of 'thank you notes,' snarky remarks, and other stuff which isn't formally spam but is clutter.

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Edit by waffles

This is now implemented with the following caveats

1. The answer must have the score of -1 or lower
2. It requires 3 votes.

Also, the tools deleted tab has been amended to include deleted answers so we can audit this.

Answer 2

Relax or remove the daily limit of flags, close votes, and delete votes. (Did I miss any others?)

Update: The number of moderator flags now depends on your rep. See here.

Answer 3

The ability to edit comments made by other users.

Moderators already have that ability, and I find it extremely useful. I might entrust that power to a 20K user.

Answer 4

The ability to protect questions, perhaps limited in the same way close votes/flags are.

This privilege was implemented for 15k users on Feb. 9. 2011.

Answer 5

I think this is the wrong question to be asking, I would rather ask:

What work would the moderators like to be able to delegate to the most trusted users?

And

What would we like the moderators to do quicker?

Then see if 20K+ users or other uses can be given the power to help out.

Answer 6

Merging posts would be useful.

Answer 7

Let 20K users spend up to two of their close votes on a single question.

You could scale it by letting them cast an additional vote to close on a single question for every 20K or 40K the user has. By the time they are 100K (or 200K), they can spend 5 votes on one question and close it themselves.

Answer 8

Maybe the ability to turn answers into comments and comments into answers.

This can be combined with vote for delete answers. (Migrate to comment option).

Update: Converting answers into comments is now implemented for moderators.

Answer 9

Allows users with 20K on one site to have full privileges for everything except vote to close and vote to delete across all stack exchange sites on which they have at least 200 rep (100 for account association plus 100 earned locally).

Why? Certain skills are valid on all sites. Earning 20K rep anywhere shows that you understand on some level what makes a good question/answer and that you know how the general system works; you ought to be able to make good edits and flags at a new site right away. For tagging, you may not know aperture from f-stop on the photography site, but you'd know that '4.0' or '2010' probably aren't good tags anywhere, and you'd know how to fix them when you saw them.

The reason to hold back vote-to-open/close and vote-to-delete is that it takes a lot more involvement within each specific community to understand what's on-topic for that community.

This would have the pleasant side effect of helping seed new communities with privileged users faster as well.

As a side note, while I think this is a great idea, perhaps it's something to save for the 50K milestone.

An alternative that scales would be to divide rep requirements in half every time you double your rep at 20K and beyond.

Another alternative is to award an additional 100 rep for account association for each site on which you have at least 20K rep. This would encourage participation on more sites and help give 20K users an additional leg up on new sites without giving away the farm. So if you're 20K one one site and you associate your account to a new site, you get the base 100 for account association plus another 100 reward because you've earned 20K once: 200 total. If you're 20K on two sites, 300 total. The advantage here is that you wouldn't have to change the privilege calculation algorithm anywhere.

Answer 10

This would be more of a trophy than an ability to moderate the site, but....

Vanity URLs for the person. So for example, stackoverflow.com/KyleBrandt

Answer 11

Remove the rate-limiting on comments.

Answer 12

With 1500 rep you can edit tag wikis if you have 100 upvotes or are in the top 20 of the tag.

You could lower this threshold by increasing rep above 20k. Eventually eliminating it altogether.

Other wikis (for example the privilege wiki) can be made accessible too.

The ability to edit any tag wiki was given to 20k users on Feb. 9. 2011. The old tag wiki editor requirements are no longer in effect.

Answer 13

From Are the hottest questions necessarily the right ones to feature?:

Perhaps the featured questions should be hand-picked from among the hottest questions?

We could empower 20k users to cast votes for featured questions.

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I want to address the question of "How strong would this be?". The existing formula is documented as:

(log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores)  
--------------------------------------------------------  
((Qage+1) - ((Qage - Qupdated)/2)) ^ 1.5

I propose something like

(log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5 + Qvotes) + sum(Ascores)
------------------------------------------------------------------
((Qage+1) - ((Qage - Qupdated)/2)) ^ 1.5

where votes age out after a time like those to close, reopen, delete, etc. Perhaps 24 hours is a good time constant.

Any way, the point is that this would be the power to nudge question up, not the unilateral power to install them on the featured list.

I don't have a really good answer to Georg's comment, except that I think the existing system already has that problem and that this will not exacerbate it by much.

Answer 14

No more robot verification!

and/or

The ability to grafitit unicorns over any question they want to

Answer 15

Ability to delete comments. Not really clever but I think comments could use a good scrubbing now and again.

Answer 16

Remove the 2 day limit on voting to delete closed questions.

20K users should have enough about them to know when a question should be deleted rather than leaving it closed.

Obviously still have the 3 non-moderator delete votes requirement.

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EDIT by waffles

This is now implemented for all 20k users.

Answer 17

No really useful per se, but it'd be nice to get access to the site usage statistics available to moderators, view suspicious vote patterns, etc

This can even have a higher rep requirement if you will.

Answer 18

The ability to temporarily lock questions from being edited, to prevent ridiculous edit wars like this one. 3 votes from 20k+ users locks the post for a day or so. Perhaps when voting to lock, pick an edit to rollback and lock to?

This would be a nice filler before a moderator notices what's going on and locks it permanently.

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Aarobot has a good way of looking at it, "stop the presses until a moderator looks at it" - throws unlocking out of the window but it would be a great way of halting abuse until a moderator arrives.

Answer 19

Timers should not apply to 20K users. Or even stop them at 5K.

Or, as in the question, scale them depending on rep e.g. 5K has a four second comment vote counter, 10K three seconds, etc.

Answer 20

I'm not sure it's worth looking for privileges to grant, personally.

By the time someone's reached 20K, I'd hope they're really doing it for the love of knowledge-sharing rather than for some sort of reward - so I don't think it's needed as a "hook". I suspect you're thinking of it more as a way of giving back to regular users, but frankly the site is its own reward IMO.

I think user powers should be granted according to what the site needs, and according to who is in a best position to fulfil those needs.

Answer 21

The ability to put questions/answers on hold for a certain amount of time (maybe 30-60 minutes, that would be subject to balance).

A question/answer that is on hold can not be seen by anyone except the on who posted it and other 20k+ users.

A user can put a question/answer on hold to give the asker/answerer a chance to fix it before the closing/downvoting starts, or worse, a wrong answer gets accepted or upvoted. That means putting a question/answer on hold should always be done with a comment indicating what should be improved (fix formatting, provide information, provide links, etc.). If the question is fixed, a privileged user can take it off hold again.

The intention here is, to reduce noise, and to enforce that people actually think before they post. I think if someone is new to the site and experiences this once, he might actually learn more than if his question just gets closed.

Second Idea: Lower rep users can flag posts for language problems. A privileged user that speaks the native language of the poster can put the post on hold, discuss problems in the native language of the poster and help translate. This would of course require some kind of language property in the profile.

Answer 22

This is now implemented with at least two new privilege levels:

• 15k allows users to protect questions

• 20k allows users to make edits to tag wikis without going through peer review of any kind, and also to cast delete votes against negatively voted answers. Also they can cast delete votes against a closed question regardless of its age.

Answer 23

Reset (or decrease) spam/offensive flags.

Answer 24

Allow users with 20K+ reputation points to see other users' deleted answers.

Why? So that when a user complains on Meta about getting blocked by the bad content mechanism, the entirety of 20k+ users can review the decision, and raise a flag if the blocking looks doubtful.

It's not that I distrust the team to do the right thing in blocking persistently bad question askers - not at all. I think this is the best new feature in all of SO's history. But it's an automated algorithm, and there is always the possibility of unfair blockings, or (very rarely) unjustified downvotings that lead to a blocking.

Making deleted questions visible would allow a part of the community to quality control the process. Plus I'm pretty sure people who reach 20k have become so tired of shitty questions, they are unlikely to raise hell for blocked users unless in cases where it's clear that the ruling was really, really unfair.

Answer 25

Add "flagged comments" to the moderator tools.

(Frankly, this is probably fine for 10K)

Update: This is now implemented in the 10k tools.

Update #2: This has been removed from 10k tools again, see: Feedback on tools/flagged changes

Answer 26

A real idea:

The ability to propose tag synonyms that are instantly accepted - with the extra condition that you need to have over 50 votes in the original tag already.

A silly idea:

The ability to change your display name at any time.

Answer 27

Allow the gifting of reputation for exceptional questions/answers up to double what the current received rep for that question/answer is. Make it so you can gift, e.g., 5% of what you have above 20k per day, and give the user that received the gift a "gifted" badge.

Answer 28

The ability to cornify the avatar of annoying users for 24 hours.

Answer 29

add a new and useful privilege that gives people actual power to effect more change on the site

When I try to think of new abilities that fit this requirement, I start by looking for things that I think are broken in some way on Stack Overflow. And, really, not much is right now. However, there are three areas that I think could use some improvement: tagging, attention for old 'open' questions, and better handling of off-topic questions.

I'm not sure any of those could be helped with new abilities for individual users without an extensive addition to the user interface to support it (with the possible exception of perhaps making it easier for 20K users to close questions).

Answer 30

View Site As... Feature

It's easy to forget what the site might look like to other users. That's why Facebook introduced the "View As..." feature:

The ability to enter a certain reputation score and then see what the site would look like would be very useful when trying to post ideas or help users on Meta. Examples:

• I want to take a screenshot to demonstrate how to access a feature, but my view of the page is cluttered with options that are not available to the average user.

• I want copy/paste an error message that high rep users don't see (you can't comment, etc).

• I'm just curious whether or not a particular feature is accessible to a user with 976, etc., reputation.

Some high-rep users and mods create "puppet" accounts to achieve this goal (being careful not to use them in fraudulent ways), but this has obvious downsides and probably isn't a good idea for the majority of 10k+/20k+ users.

If we could gain access to some sort of "view as..." feature, or official "sock puppet" accounts that are invisible to other users (with locked rep, certain restrictions, etc), it'd be helpful.