Do some users have too much rep?

Question

In the past few weeks, I have noticed a new trend: A considerable number of users having 4-digit reputations earned through a large number of mediocre, not-bad-enough-to-downvote-but-not-great-either, questions, with a small number of upvotes each.

I realize this is mainly due to the entire field shifting upwards: The top user has a reputation of almost 250,000 now. It is a perfectly natural development for the average reputation count to grow, the longer users are active on the site.

Still, I'm not sure whether this particular thing is a good development. The rep count on Stack Overflow used to tell me something about the user - yes, always with consideration for the inherent weaknesses of the reputation metric, and taken with a huge chunk of salt. But still. I have the feeling the metric is getting seriously watered down by this trend.

Let me be clear: I have nothing against users because they ask only questions; nor do I have anything against, well, normal everyday questions. Not every question can be deep and insightful and glamorous. I am not suggesting that the activity of these users be restricted in any way beyond what has been successfully implemented for persistent askers of really bad questions. (Although many among them have made it a habit to ask on SO instead of looking in the f-ing manual first, but that's a different story.)

I also don't really mind those users gaining reputation as such, but my impression is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell from the reputation count whether it's a) a true expert in their field who is moderately active on Stack Overflow, or b) a particularly persistent question asker.

Is this a problem?

If yes, does something need to be done about it?

I am starting to think, in a 180° turn from what I used to think, that maybe it's even time to devalue questions once again, from +5 to something even lower, or abolishing rep gain on question upvotes altogether, and creating other ways of rewarding good questions.

Answer 1

This is a simplistic and glib answer, but if we ran another global reputation recalc, we might see a lot of this reputation dribble away. It's the type of users you mention who tend to have a lot of migrated and closed-as-off-topic questions, whose reputation should disappear if those questions have since been deleted.^*

^* We still need to remove reputation earned for questions that have been migrated, and also remove reputation earned for answers on questions that have been closed.

Answer 2

Do not forget, reputation is a measure of the amount of trust the community has in you. If the community likes mediocre questions, they will be awarded with a reputation gain.

In my opinion this is not a problem. I have found that "easy" questions and answers get a lot of attention. And a lot of votes. Hard questions don't attract that much traffic so they won't be rewarded as much as they "should" be. If we want to "fix" this, we need to drop the community votes and let a (selected) jury vote for the answers. But we get a whole different site than we have now.

Answer 3

MSO-Golf answer: No.

If you're using rep as a measure of expertise, you're doing it wrong. Like Gamecat said, this is a measure of someone's contribution to the community.

The reward for that contribution is increased access to the more advanced functions on the site - closing questions, editing, etc. Are some users abusing these features? Is it only the high-volume low-quality users who are committing these abuses? Personally I don't think so.

The only real problem that is bothering me is flag abuse (which I do think is related to large numbers of 10K users having access to the flag list). I know Jeff has hinted they are working on this. I haven't seen anything too bad with the other high-rep features.

Answer 4

it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell from the reputation count whether it's a) a true expert in their field who is moderately active on Stack Overflow, or b) a particularly persistent question asker.

You can't just click on their question page and see that they asked 500 questions?

That is a tremendous number of words to type when you meant "show me the ratio of rep per question".

Beyond that, we already:

• reduced the value of questions from +10 to +5
• started banning at the IP level (includes all deleted posts) users who persistently ask bad questions

Answer 5

I was actually thinking about the same stuff when I wrote this question today: Has Stack Overflow considered a sliding score for reputation?.

Using a sliding windows approach means you have to provide good questions and answers all the time to keep a high reputation.

UPDATE: You will get point for older answers and question if people up vote them later on as well since that is an indication that the topic is relevant.

Answer 6

I think the problem here is the focus on reputation, something that has been discussed previously.

Reputation is what you make of it. If you or the system attach certain prestige or privilege to it then you create the monster, you feed it and you give power to it.

It's a currency, but like any currency if its a free market people will take it any way they can. And, honestly, it's not so hard to get 10k rep if you don't have a life and you really, really want it badly enough (this doesn't mean most people don't deserve it, just indicating the system can be gamed).

The best thing about the site is the quality answers, you can just shut your eyes and ignore the rep and you still get an awesome site. But once you add a gaming component to the system there will always be people who just want to play the game. This site is testament to that fact, just look at the reputation of many of the top ranked people on here compared to their reputation on other sites.

So, is the problem that people have too much rep? Not really. I think your focus is in the wrong area. If there really is a problem, then maybe it is lack of visibility for deserving questions because of look-at-me type questions being upvoted and asked repeatedly.

Maybe some of the regulars should spend more time downvoting. Maybe there should be no loss of points for 10k users to downvote. This would combine well with the suggestion for 20k users to have limits removed.