Should we cap reputation gained from questions at +2000?

Question

Please disregard. This proposal has been abandoned in favor of a new proposal.

Please disregard. The new proposal has been abandoned in favor of just plain not doing it.

Based on:

Could we put a cap on reputation earned by asking questions?

I am starting to wonder if we should cap reputation gained for questions.

I have historically resisted this, but:

1. It does seem nonsensical that users can get 10,000+ reputation purely on the basis of asking hundreds of questions.
2. We already cap reputation for suggested edits -- you can never get more than +1000 total reputation from suggested edits.
3. It would de-incentivize asking questions for the sake of asking questions which I think is a very good thing.
4. 99.99% of users never even come close to this limit, so in practice it won't change the experience for users who ask a reasonable, typical number of questions.

I wonder if a limit of max +2000 reputation from question upvotes would make sense?

Not many users would be affected; here's a relevant data.stackexchange query:

https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/s/1057/users-with-more-than-400-upvotes-on-their-questions

That's about 226 users on Stack Overflow, and almost none everywhere else in the network. However, some of these "ask a zillion question" users would indeed be affected severely. You can roughly calculate how much rep they'd have after this change, by taking the sum of all their answer upvotes and adding 2000.

Answer 1

I wonder if a limit of max +2000 reputation from question upvotes would make sense?

Absolutely not.

As I've said before, asking good questions provides value to the community, not only through posing interesting problems, but also because tremendous insight can be gained from the answers -- answers cannot exist without questions. If a given question has no value whatsoever, then it simply should not exist. Maybe moderators need to start culling more questions.

In any event, why is reaching 10k from question upvotes alone a problem?

I've yet to see any evidence there's something wrong with this. Please cite cases of these users abusing the system, or otherwise behaving in a way that is unacceptible to the community.

Is it possible these users can actually add value to the community having access to the 10k tools?

If we're concerned about certain users reaching 10k in a certain way, then it's time to change the relationship between reputation and privileges. For example, to reach 10k privileges, perhaps we should require a balanced mixture of participation on the site, i.e., 10k+ rep and 80 edits and 500 total votes cast, or something to that effect. The same approach could be applied to the lower tiers as well, although less aggressively.

I see no reason to artificially cap the reward for providing value to the community.

In fact, I think it would be anti-community to do that.

We've already gone to the length of reducing the weight of question upvotes, but where will this end? Eventually these users will meet the criteria for the 10k tools. Reputation is cumulative: it's inevitable. At that point, are we going to change the rules again to keep them out?

Answer 2

I am for this system provided there is an adjustment:

After your first 500 question reps, you can only gain more question reps when your answer rep is higher than your question rep.

1. Cap question rep at 500
2. Allow for another 500 rep more from questions per 2000 rep gained.

Question rep means, all rep generated by question upvotes, downvotes and accepts.
Answer rep means, all rep generated by answer accepts, upvotes and downvotes.

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Overall this change will affect we less than 1000 users on Stack Overflow. There are a handful of exceptional question askers that are affected but the vast majority do not fit into this mold. As long as you answer a total of half the the questions you ask you are unlikely to be affected.

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This system would cause a 0 reputation change for:

• Joel Coehoorn
• Jon Skeet
• Michael Stum
• And so on

It would eradicate reputation and make it close to 500 for:

• Blankman
• George2
• dotnetdev
• And so on

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Overall I would be very happy with this change, as it encourages our high rep users to keep on asking the great questions they always ask, provided they give back.

I dislike the idea of punishing users, even slightly, for what we all believe is great behavior.

Answer 3

This is another case of Stack Overflowism; since something is broken for the 0.0001% of the population on Stack Overflow, we must bend the rules everywhere and make the reputation system "even more complex" (complaint Jeff threw in my general direction in reply of an unrelated suggestion, see chat for that).

10k rep from just asking means 2,000 question upvotes. Two thousand of them. Okay, let's say 1.5k and a few hundred accepts. It's still outstanding community participation, for the relatively measly powers having 10k reputation on Stack Overflow unlocks (= a few lists, but I take it those users don't close anyway, and inline retagging, but I take it those "problem users" aren't editing anyway).

I don't think any action is required, or necessary.

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If action is required, I don't like the plan of placing a hard cap of 2,000 reputation, or the plan of capping at 500 question rep per 2k rep, for they will also affect users who are not abusing the community. Even under Waffles' more permissive plan this means your question reputation may not be more than 25% of your total rep, or in other words, you need 2 answer upvotes per question upvote to not be capped.

Pardon my horrible, horrible SQL:

• Users with more than 400 question upvotes: SO vs Gaming (bonus: SF)
• Users with more than 100 votes and more than one question upvote per two answer upvotes: SO vs Gaming

If we really do need to address abusive users with an ad hoc rule, why not turn it around? Let's say you cannot gain more than 2,000 question reputation per 500 non-question reputation, or in other words, you need more than 8 question upvotes per answer upvote to trigger the cap.

• Users with more than 400 votes and more than one question upvote per eight answer upvotes: SO (no other site is affected that I can see).

I think this query matches actual problem users more accurately than the other does. It also stops users at 2,101 reputation instead of 601; on many sites, that only means gaining edit privileges (and chat gallery creation privileges). I see no issue with this.

Answer 4

As I offered in my original question, I think we should scale the cap with the user's answer-rep. For instance, a user's cap for question-rep could be 200 points or 20% of their total rep from answers (whichever is larger).

The reasoning behind this is that, with a fixed cap, every high-rep user would eventually lose some of the incentive to ask questions. Even users trying to game the system can sometimes ask perfectly good questions, and if they leave, those questions would be lost. Also, obtaining an answer is not always its own reward.

If we scale the cap with answer-rep, on the other hand, we now give them an incentive to start answering questions. But what if the gamers decide to start posting lots of constructive answers to up their answer-rep? M.F.A.

Answer 5

Let me get this straight — users ask questions, of a quality level sufficient to garner upvotes from other users. We have a problem with this because __?

• If it's because they're earning privileges, why not target the privileges directly? With all the new sites opening up with much smaller communities, that's a system that's due for an overhaul anyway.
• If it's because they "outrank" a few other users who spend more time answering questions, perhaps the thing to do is help those answerers "be more awesome" by comparison.
• If it's because that's all they do on the site, I think we need a clearer reason for why that's a bad thing. If they were low-score questions that would be one thing, but this will only target users with lots of questions that people have voted for.

The only reason I see to do this is when you look at rep in it's role as a gauge for trust. Some people feel like certain users are using question-rep to game the system, and if they're gaming the system in this way we have an inherently untrustworthy user. But again, this goes back to point #1: in light of the all new sites with smaller communities and no high-rep users, it may be time for a general re-examination of how some of these privileges are conferred.

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Update:

I think my whole beef here is that just because questions are very low value, especially compared to answers, it doesn't mean that their value is 0 or negative. There must be some net-positive, or the best solution to the problem would be to do away with them entirely and morph Stack Overflow into some kind of wiki+voting blog service. After all, the questions weren't adding anything. Obviously I don't want to do that, and I don't think anyone else does either. However, that is the natural result if you really apply the low-value philosophy for questions consistently.

So sure, people may be asking questions as a game in it's own right, but, as long as the quality level is high enough to earn votes, is this actively harmful? Is Stack Overflow really worse off for having these questions?

I suppose it might be, if you consider these questions to be nothing but "noise" on the site. Each question individually might be okay, but add up thousands of them and suddenly you have a background layer of fluff that makes finding what you really want just that much more difficult. The problem here is that these questions still tend to generate good answers, and so there's little evidence that they really make searching or answering harder. And I don't think there are enough of these that they pull significant attention of answerers away from users with legitimate issues we could be spending time resolving.

In the end, I think when you have a question with a positive score the burden of proof switches back away from the poster to administration to prove that this particular question is noise and has no value, versus just assuming that's the case, or a very least a clearer explanation of how, exactly, these questions from frequent askers are actively hurting either answerers, searchers, or other askers.

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Update 2:

I see now another reason why some feel so strongly that this is harmful: it dilutes their efforts at answering. I'll put it in the context of the career site. Two users with extremely similar resumes are both up for the same job via Stack Overflow careers: one with 3000 rep from answers and one with 4000 rep from questions. Who gets the job?

Personally, I think that's kind of silly. If the hiring manager is just looking at the number without digging deeper, are you really sure you wanted to work for this person in the first place? It does, though, illustrate the problem. How does the user who worked hard for 3000 rep feel that there are 4000 rep users out there who don't contribute?

So if we want to make it easier on the manager and other outsiders to distinguish the two individuals, perhaps the solution here is some kind of indicator on a profile that says, "This person has earned more than X percent of their rep from asking questions." The notice would only need to be displayed for users above a certain score when X is above a certain value to be determined based on meaningful examination of the the real data. Like a big asterisk next to a sports record.

I know Jeff is generally against such scarlet letters, but we already have at least two of these: the student flag and the accepted answer percentage. Another option is to just set that flag automatically on the assumption that if you're asking so many questions, you must still be a student rather than a pro.

It's tempting here to think that I may be too divorced from the issue because no one on Stack Overflow who earns rep by only asking questions has even 1/5th of my score, but my ServerFault and SuperUser profiles are much closer to the main stream. Nearly 20% of my ServerFault rep is from questions, and my total question count there is roughly half of my answer count. This does effect me, especially as I work in IT support now rather than as a programmer.

Really, I think this whole issue is rooted in the idea that reputation is an approximation of one's ability or usefulness. It's a mistake to believe this is possible. That said, if this is part of the goal I also know that just because it's not possible to be perfect, it doesn't mean we should just give up. Nevertheless, I think that if there is to be another adjustment that changes rep scores, before it happens we need a way to objectively quantify the value of questions verses answers.

The root of the problem is that 5 points for a question verses 10 for an answer is completely arbitrary, just as 10 each was before the last recalc. If there is to be another change, to support it I would want to see an object criteria for determining the value of questions compared to answers that can be supported based on data from the monthly dumps. The purpose of this request is to ensure that this is the last time such an adjustment needs to be made. Support the request from data in a way that tells us exactly where the adjustment needs to be.

Answer 6

It would hit some users heavily; I feel bad for some, for example Michael Stum who has a record of asking consistently excellent questions. Edward Tanguay's track record is well known as well. There are others.

Still, I say do it. Some discrimination starts becoming necessary when such large reputation figures can be reached only through asking questions.

Answer 7

I'm reluctant to support this. While answering questions is all well and good, there would be no answers without questions.

Further, we have a glut of bad questions. A quick perusal doesn't appear to demonstrate that those that ask questions beyond the 2k limit are asking bad questions. Penalizing those that are feeding good questions into the system, which in turn draw good answers from the community, which in turn gets more Google juice ^{_{(The pagerank must flow!)}} seems to be poor form.

To some degree, it has a feeling of killing the golden goose.

However, I don't honestly think that it'll hurt the situation - we'll still get answers. Surely we'll lose a few people who will leave in disgust, but if you publicly state questions aren't very important (which is what this is) then you should feel no loss for those hurt by this change.

So the question you should be asking is:

What is the point of reputation, and how does this change make reputation better or worse?

Ostensibly reputation is a measure of how much the community trusts a given user and appreciates their contributions.

In reality it hasn't met its lofty goals, but it is used for two important tasks:

• Determining a user's ability to participate in the community by voting to open and close, editing, and performing other tasks.
• As a relative measure, against the other users on the site, of expertise in terms of potential employees to SOIS employee seeking clients - in other words a ranking system that may make hiring decisions a little easier.

Honestly, the first is merely moderation, and I don't think that asking good questions has any more or less impact on whether a user should be able to make such decisions or not, so this change doesn't matter in that regard.

The second point is more interesting. This change is in stackoverflow's interest primarily because the job engine now acts as a significant revenue source for SOIS. While being able to ask good questions is an important skill, already having the knowledge required to fill a position is arguably better, and in my experience, those that can answer questions well already have the skills to ask good questions where needed.

I still don't like the feeling of it - this is a significant change to the reputation system, and since questions do count up to a point I can't see that we're really re-defining what reputation is. I'd feel more comfortable if we redefined reputation to dis-include questions altogether, as it seems to be more clean and self consistent. However, we do need to consider that questions bring new programmers here, and getting them hooked on reputation is also important.

So... after some rambling, I say go for it.

Answer 8

• A few names in that list are known to me as good contributors (my list looks rather like Pekka's in that regard).

• Rather more than that are on my list of users I think are abusing the system.

• But I'm surprised to see how many I don't recognize. Maybe I haven't been as active on SO lately; I'm spending more time on real world stuff and on some new SE sites.

Anyway, how costly would it be to use a limit like max(2000,PointsFromAnswers)? (Working on the assumption that people who generate a lot of points from answers ask better questions than those who do not.)

Answer 9

dmckee already just suggested what I wanted to say, but I have one more thing to add:

Don't apply it here on meta, for the same reason that you still give 10 rep instead of 5 rep for question upvotes. Good questions (i.e. bugs or feature requests) generally have a higher importance attached to them on meta than on Stack Overflow.

Other than that, go for it.

Answer 10

If the primary objective is to punish bad questions, how about making downvotes on questions more potent? Make it so that a downvote on a question is worth -5, rather than -2. Like this, bad questions will not earn a user any reputation and perhaps will even cost him some.

Answer 11

I respect and believe in the intent of this proposal. I agree with the problem present. But I feel that this may be going about it in a very inefficient manner.

Yes, this would stop the reputation flow of the problem users in question. But it takes a long time to do it if they aren't immediately affected. And in the mean while, the people who are most easily affected by it are the people who provide good questions that receive many upvotes.

In essence, if the cap is +2000, it will take hundreds upon hundreds of mediocre questions to reach it. In the case of waffles' suggestion, it won't take nearly as long but it'll still take around a hundred posts, give or take the luck of whether upvotes are earned or not. That's a lot of junk questions!

On Stack Overflow, perhaps the speed is high enough that you'll see this more readily. But on the smaller sites, this will take a long time. These users will just be sitting around, "not giving back" just as you call it, and nothing gets done about for months upon months. Eventually, they do get stopped, but not after all of this has piled up and festered on the site.

Meanwhile, while all of these problematic users are still left to their own devices, users who actually do contribute by providing great questions that receive great answers will be halted much earlier. According to the numbers, there aren't that many affected. But they're the ones who will be affected a lot more easily on the new sites. It takes far fewer excellent questions to reach these caps than it does with mediocre ones. Losing 500 reputation might not sound like a lot, but it is when you've only got 1200 reputation for around 30 posts in total.

The queries that people have run tell us how many people will be immediately affected. But how many budding "ask-for-the-sake-of-asking" users are just sitting there underneath these limits, just spewing out questions without anything to stop them? We stop those with a history of low quality, but we don't do anything if they just have a sheer volume of mediocrity. Nothing until it's an overwhelming volume, it seems.

Is the problem that they're not giving back to the community, or is it that they're earning reputation in the process of such? If the problem we want to target is the former, I don't think this affects much more than the most high-profile of examples.

Answer 12

If the problem is that some users ask hundreds or thousands of low-quality questions garnering significant rep due to the sheer number of questions asked, the solution isn't to cap reputation gained from asking questions, but to cap the number of questions used in calculating reputation. If you limited question rep to the amount gained for the top 200 questions, then you'd have to average 2 upvotes per question in order to amass 2000 reputation. Further limiting it to the top 100 questions would mean that you'd need 4 upvotes on average to reach 2000 reputation.

One possible solution to question "spamming" as a reputation gathering tool: only count max(100,answers_given_count) questions for reputation purposes. This would still provide an incentive to ask good questions, even if beyond the 100 question threshold since you might add a question that moves into your top 100 and increases your reputation, but it would remove any incentive for continuing to ask crappy questions for purely rep purposes. It wouldn't punish anyone for asking good questions at all as really good questions would still earn significant reputation.

Though this query doesn't take into account the answers, you can see that there are people who do ask very good questions who aren't what we would call problem users. It would be a shame to remove the incentive for people who do ask good questions to keep doing it just to corral a relatively few problem users.

Answer 13

The site needs questions just as much as it needs answers. Why shouldn't people who ask good questions be rewarded for doing so?

The problem is people asking lots of weak questions just for the random upvotes. If a question gets a lot of upvotes then it's a good question and the person who asked it deserves the rep. So what you'd want is to disincentivise people from asking lots of questions just for the sake of it, but not limit people who ask good questions. The current proposal seems too indiscriminate. The punishment should fit the crime: punishing all question askers because some questioners are abusing the system is misguided.

So here is a proposal to do that (or rather, some proposals):

• After your first 20 questions, questions "cost" 10 rep to ask [Numbers negotiable]
• After you've hit 2000 rep from questions, the first two upvotes on new questions don't earn you rep [This way, there's no incentive to ask weak questions. If a question is getting several upvotes, then it's worthy of a reward]

I don't know how easy this would be to implement however.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have earned a large proportion of my reputation on tex.stackexchange from asking questions. But at least a dozen of those questions have more than 10 upvotes, so I feel I am contributing to the community, even if I don't yet know enough to answer many questions.

Answer 14

I'm against this proposal, for reasons more than me being on this list(I had decided it sounded bad before I found out)

The reason: I think a flat +2000 rep cap is ridiculous, and very low at that. I suggest something more like only 1000 rep from questions per 500 rep from other forms(answers, answer accepts, edits, etc). Otherwise, after hitting the rep cap, what use is there in trying to form good questions? I could ask anything I want no matter how stupidly formated, negative votes on my questions won't matter, since I'm about 1000 rep over the rep cap in questions.

Bad idea, you're just suggesting people make spam answers instead of spam questions. I'm sure it's a bit more effort, but not much.

Also, this doesn't change the real problem you're trying to fix. I'm pretty sure you're trying to fix question spam: A user posting 50 questions a day so that they can get 5 or 6 upvotes per day. What you should be doing is counting the amount of bad questions(or questions period), not the amount of votes received just because someone has asked an overall moderate amount of good questions.

I really like Seamus' 2nd suggestion, which perfectly does what Jeff wants. Basically, making it so that a question doesn't count toward reputation until the score is more than +2(after say 2000 rep, or 100 questions, or some similar measure). This would thump basically every question-spammer because now instead of asking 20 questions a day and getting 2 or 3 sympathy upvotes a day, they must ask at least one good question to get an amount of reputation. This does hurt the niche tags however which do not commonly get very many votes on questions or answers. This is a minority of a minority though, so I think it doesn't matter much.

Answer 15

So what is the root of the problem you are trying to solve?

Obviously the symptom is that some people are able to gain moderator access and devalue the reputation system without actually contributing anything - they just post any endless stream of very low value questions.

A hard cut off (2000 rep from questions) would stop the symptoms, but it also affects users who make good questions, which we want. I don't think full effects of this yet known - most of the sites that are defined by the quality of their questions have not reached the mass of SO, where the quality of answers is the main qualifier.

I would argue that the cause of this problem is the pity vote. For some reason people are inclined to add an up vote for:

• A question with zero votes
• A question or answer with 1 or more downvotes that may be wrong, but is not outright 'offensive'.

Pity votes given to counteract downvotes is something for another day. But the reputation gained by those +1 pity votes adds up when a user is dumping half a dozen pitful questions on the site each day. Changing the questions to only +5 reputation only slowed this down.

To solve this can we change how much reputation is awarded for a question upvote based on how many upvotes that question already has. Under the new system a question with only 1 upvote would give zero reputation. Further votes could either give +5 reputation, or a curve could be introduced so that truly good questions (>5 upvotes) would start receiving the original +10 reputation for each subsequent upvote.

Answer 16

My first thought, which I do not yet have data to support, is that a better solution might be to cap reputation earned from awarding the accepted answer checkmark. Right now, you can get +2 for each question you ask by doing that, regardless of whether your questions are good or not.

In theory, bad questions won't get upvotes but good questions will. If the system works like the theory suggests it should, this change would minimize the damage to good askers while continuing to penalize the bad ones. In practice... I need to figure out how to generate the relevant data.

EDIT:
Looks like Jeff was right. According to this SEDE query (developed with assistance from @drachenstern), not a single user has earned 2k rep purely from accepting answers, and only ten have earned over 1k rep that way.

Of course, 1836 rep is still a lot of rep to have gotten just from a +2 here and a +2 there (especially when, thanks to bounties, that's 224% of the user's total rep) but it's not a useful metric in the context of this question.

Answer 17

I'm for the spirit of this proposal but against the methodology of employing it. A few users have suggested solutions in the neighborhood of what I think is best, but haven't nailed it.

The goal here, as I understand it, is to mitigate the reputation gain for people who ask tons of mediocre questions. Jeff has said a few times in a few answers that we're optimizing for great answers (pearls) rather than for the questions that produce them (sand).

However, Andrew makes a good point as well. We should optimize for great questions that have the best chance to produce great answers (sand most likely to create pearls). If we have a user who posts 1000 questions and each one of them brought the site thousands of views, had answers with tons of upvotes, and solved problems not addressed elsewhere, the user who asked them is doing the site just as much good as those answering the questions.

While I realize that we want to "de-incentivize asking questions for the sake of asking questions", I think that we need to take the quality of the questions into account rather than the number of questions asked by a person.

With that in mind, my proposed solution would be to scale up the value of rep gained from upvotes to questions as the question received more votes. An example of how this might work:

• Before "Nice Question" (votes 1-9): 1 points per upvote
• Before "Good Question" (votes 10-24): 2 points per upvote
• Before "Great Question" (votes 25-99): 5 points per upvote
• At/After "Great Question" (votes 100+): 10 points per upvote

I think it's very easy to see how people who ask a lot of mediocre questions would not see a lot of movement in their reputation scores, whereas people who ask awesome questions would be rewarded in kind.

My suggested point values per upvote are not something I'm dogmatic about. You could alter this such that the first 9 votes rewarded no reputation at all (thus further promoting that asking a question for the sake of rep means asking a good question), reduce/increase the value of each tier based on the traffic of the particular site (to normalize for upvotes given simply because of a site being a site with higher traffic/question views), etc etc etc.

I would say, however, that you receive a vote that sends a question to the next tier, the increase in point value would only apply to that vote and future votes. Otherwise, rep gain would see a lot of spikes.

Answer 18

We have some users that ask lots of lots of bad questions and just by asking so many questions get up votes and the 2 rep from accepting the answers Then we have other users that ask good questions and therefore get lots of up votes.

I was about to say

The 2 rep for each question you accept the answer for should be capped

However I think it would be better if.

It cost 2 rep to post each question after someone posts their first 50 questions – therefore it will not be possible to get more than a 100 rep gain from accepting questions.

So as to cope with people that ask lots of good questions, maybe something like

The max rap from asking questions is limited to 1000 unless you got on average more up votes then the number of questions you ask.

Answer 19

I don't like the idea that people who've asked a lot of questions lose any reputation incentive to ask good questions in the future. This is a problem both with the proposed straight reputation cap and the reputation cap adjusted by answer votes.

I propose to reduce the rep gained from question upvotes after a certain threshold (the figure 100 may need to be adjusted):

• The first 100 questions upvotes get you 5 rep each.
• The next 100 get you 4 each, then 3 each, then 2 each.
• After 400 question upvotes, each question upvote only gives you 1 rep. Question downvotes still cost 2.

With this proposal, “pity upvotes” no longer work if you've asked many questions, but there's still an incentive to receive upvotes.

I don't know how hard it would be to gather all the necessary data, but it doesn't seem to require more information than waffles's proposal.

Answer 20

I really don't think that this is a good solution. The SO community depends on questions. Without questions, you can't earn any reputation by answering them.

I understand that some people who earn a lot of reputation by providing outstanding answers think that it is unfair that users earn a lot of reputation by "only" asking questions. But you seem to forget that asking good questions which will increase the reputation is also a very time-consuming and not an easy task.

If an user does not put any effort into asking good questions, he want earn any upvotes for this question in the first place.

So this suggestion to set the reputation cap wouldn't improve the quality of questions. In contrast, if anything changes, user won't put as much effort as now into asking good questions since this isn't rewarded anymore.

Answer 21

In a comment Waffles said

ONLY asking questions and not answering anything is anti community

I am opposed to this sentiment. Let's not pretend that SO is not about questions. I hazard a guess that above 90% of questions if not above 95% are mundane drivel of trivial questions. SO is clearly enjoying the traffic, so are you now saying that the majority of your question askers are "anti-community"? A very strong sentiment if you ask me.

As for any cap between question and answer, the question is, if you can churn out a high rep from volumes of moderate answers (sympathy vote et al included) over 2 years since inception vs a newbie with 2 months of good answers, why can one not gain a high rep from churning questions? Should a person who churns mediocre answer now also be labeled as "gaming" the system by logging in often and answering easy questions early for petty rep?

The crux of the above paragraph is "why the difference"? churn is churn, mediocre is mediocre, gaming is gaming - whether question or answer - same difference.

What I would rather see is a proper split between questions and answers. Is a project manager a highly reputable technical person? Possibly. Is he a good programmer. Heck no (mostly). Is an avid questioner a "reputable" person on SO (by question sense)? - Yes, or at least insofar as a mediocre long-term answerer is.

I am arguing for a reversal of question rep point decrement. Bring it back up to 10 and have a separate (from answer) rep count for it.

Because I don't care if you are a good questioner and at the same time good answerer (crux of Waffle's ratchet system). Only answers should count - period. Questions count for something, yes, but not for answer-rep per-se. Give it its own count.

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Missed one point. Should anything be capped, it should only be the +2 for accepting answers. Even 200 is a generous enough cap to train people into accepting answers, after which, it should be a no brainier that such an action is not "reputable" at all.

Answer 22

I wasn't going to comment here because, frankly, I don't care what you do. It's your website, and you can do what you like with it! I don't mean that in a nasty way, I mean that in a "I'm delighted that it's not my problem" way. But my comment about optimising for pearl-producing-sand rather than optimising for pearls has gotten 10 votes so I'm going to expand on it a bit.

It feels as though you've just discovered something that every educator knows in their bones. If I assign my students a mental arithmetic test, then line them up according to height, and finally give the 5 shortest an 'A' grade in French, then someone might complain about my grading system.

Welcome to the world of criterion-based assessment! Relative assessment, which is what the reputation system currently is, has its place, but is very crude and not easily justified when trying to claim that a certain score relates to a certain ability.

As others have said, there's a problem stemming from the fact that reputation is used in more than one fashion: both as a way to unlock moderation tools and as a crude measure of their worth to the SE network. So changes to how reputation is calculated that are designed to improve its use in one of those will have an effect on its effectiveness for the other.

Also as others have said, if anyone is just looking at the reputation as a number and not digging further then that's actually a mark of a poor assessment system of the employer. Sadly, this happens a lot (search for "impact factor" and "academic journal" to get a measure of one place where this happens), but SE has very little control over this. The best that it can do is to make the more refined data clearly available so that job seekers can do more than just list their reputation, and can point to (say) number of accepted answers, number of "excellent" answers, or other relevant features. Again, which pieces are needed will depend too much on the actual situation, so SE should just make all the data easily available so that employers and candidates can easily find what they need.

That leaves us with reputation as a way to unlock moderation tools. Here, SE has total control and here the relative-based method of simply saying, "User X has N reputation so they can now do Y" is shown up to be completely daft. It really ought to be criterion based.

I completely agree with the hypothesis that a user who only asks questions should not have access to the higher moderation tools. But I would say the same for a user who only answers questions. Both users have not shown evidence that they have a good understanding of how the site works. Over on TeX-SX we have a couple of "mini Jon Skeets" who power through questions, answering all that they come across, but never asking anything. (A quick glance at the top page of maths-SX shows that this phenomenon is even more pronounced over there!) These are highly valuable members of the site, but I would not trust them with the moderation tools (if anyone of them ever read this, I'm overstating to make a point). Indeed, none of these stood for moderator in our recent elections and I would not have voted for them if they had. Others, who also haven't asked many questions, have nonetheless shown a greater commitment to the site by voting, participation in meta, writing tag wikis, and so forth.

So if the purpose in this proposal is that people who only ask questions should not have the power that their reputation brings with them, then perhaps that should also apply to people who only answer questions! Of course, I would prefer a proper criterion-based system over this crude measure, namely that there should be criteria that a user has to satisfy to get access to each tool.

Incidentally, the key phrase here is: shown evidence of. You aren't ever saying, "User X has ability Y" but "User X has shown evidence of having ability Y". It's much easier to justify later.

While I'm on this, as far as moderation tools are concerned, I agree with the proposal that only recent activity should count, or at the least that there should be some decay. Suppose someone gains 10k, goes backpacking for a year, and then comes back. SE could have changed a lot since they were away and the culture shifted to a point that they need to relearn the norms before taking back their powers. (So actually maybe the formula should be (significant reputation in the last month) x (total reputation), or something. I'm a mathematician, we can dream up formulae to compute anything.)

In short (I've recently learnt what TL;DR means and while I despise the phrase, I can understand the sentiment behind it): come up with a criterion-based method of assessment and then implement it. Of course it will have parameters that will need tweaking, but by being criterion-based it will be a lot easier to justify changing those parameters than just saying, "Answers should accrue more reputation than questions so we're making it 10 to 5". But the criteria themselves will not be parameter based and will be phrased along the lines of "To gain access to moderation tool X, a user has to have shown evidence of Y". Or, for the other use of reputation, "To be listed as a 'knowledgeable user' (made-up term) in area X, a user has to have shown evidence of Y". Once you've done that, you can discuss how you will actually gather that evidence and that's where the discussion about weights and measures comes in.

Answer 23

I would support this proposal, with a caveat:

In the way that an accepted answer is immune from the rep cap, perhaps a question is immune from the rep cap once it reaches a threshold (say, +10), because then you can be fairly sure that it is a good question.

However, the threshold would have to differ for sites, because great questions on Server Fault almost never reach +10. I'm not sure about Super User but I'm guessing the same is also for the smaller Stack Exchange sites.

Answer 24

Good Question. Ultimately, there are multiple factors in play here:

• People want Reputation for their privileges and fame
• People want Answers for their questions
• Asking questions - even excellent ones - is relatively easy because they come directly out of real world problems
• Providing Answers - especially excellent ones - is a lot harder and in the end the real value
• However, people who provide good answers maybe the people who had good questions at the beginning

So rep on questions is a great way to "suck people in", to give them another reward along with good answers and hopefully turn them into return customers that eventually transition into giving answers as well.

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with saying "Feel free to ask as many more questions as you want and get great answers, but you now have to work harder for points. If you received 2000 Rep on questions, you should know a bit about the stuff you're asking, so maybe you can help others?"

2000 is a good limit because it gives access to the pending-edits-indicator, so it's a soft nudge towards participation.

I am at the point where reputation became sort-of meaningless: I won't catch up to Jon Skeet ever, yet I do have access to the 10k rep tool which is just a great source for really good questions (highest votes) and some great comedic relief (the low voted stuff). For me Stackoverflow is now a giant saw-sharpener, informational tool (just browsing random questions) and a great source to ask my own real world problems with confidence of getting a good answer.

Go for it if you feel this is really solving an issue that SO is having or will have in the future. I'm not sure if this could discourage further participants though as reaching rep is constantly harder, but the weekly/monthly/yearly top lists seem to work against that perception.

Edit as per waffles comment, I wonder if the cap could be a sliding cap? For each 1000 rep you gain through answers, your question cap raises by an additional 500? rep. Details would have to be worked out (e.g., should this work retroactively or is reputation "gained" while at the cap lost even when your cap increases later on?).

Answer 25

I'm strongly opposed to a question cap. Instead I believe that questions should attract larger down vote penalties.

I already lost a significant amount of reputation when question votes were devalued, and reputation whoring aside, I believe that good questions are critical to the value of the site external to its more hardcore users. Stackoverflow has a very good hit rate on Google, and higher question rates enable searchers to more often hit questions specific to their problem.

Furthermore, many questions remain unasked, especially in the more niche areas that heavy question askers such as myself lurk. I believe that fresh questions in those areas should attract more reputation if possible. Wading through pages of C#, Java and ASP minutae and trivia is pushing away many potential users.

Answer 26

No limit

A question is a question. If it is not you have to trust the community to moderate itself.

Isn't that the definition of StackExchange websites?

Answer 27

I am inclined to agree with this measure, although I do have a decent amount of questions on TeX-SE.

However, I'd like to propose one change: Add all bounties awarded to this number. I don't know how resource-intensive this could be, but I'd guess the reputation from bounties is much easier to calculate than doing a full rep recalc.

For example, if I have awarded 500 rep worth of bounties to questions, my effective limit should be 2500. In this way, I still have an incentive to ask questions (up to a limit) and I'm not going to accrue ridiculous amount of reputation from questions alone as I am distributing it to others.

Answer 28

Okay, my other answer was a general scheme. Here's a specific recommendation.

So questions are only valuable in so far as they are the raw stuff of which quality answers are made. So votes on questions are similarly pretty worthless, until it has been shown that the sand is pukka-pearl-producing sand. Except that votes are a good indication to an answerer that their answer is going to reach more people. I think that I would be more interested in answering a highly voted question than a lowly voted one (all other things being equal). So the votes for the question give an indication of what the answers are worth. Thus:

1. Make the reputation available for the answerers dependent on the votes for the question, and divide it up according to the votes for the answers.
2. Reverse this as well, and make the votes for the answers feed back to the reputation of the questioner.

Then a question can accrue reputation for the questioner, but only if it garners quality answers, namely if it proves to be pukka-pearl-producing-precipitate. Meanwhile, the votes for the question are merely a measure of the questions potential rewards to anyone brave enough to venture an answer.

Answer 29

If you want to stop bad questions, don't just take away the rep.

Simply be far more aggressive in deleting bad content. That ultimately should increase the overall quality of the site, take away even backdoors for gaining rep (for everyone) and makes it very clear to everyone: if you don't put some effort in your post, it will get deleted.

If those questions are really worth that little, then there's no reason to keep them around in the first place. Surely, if you'd apply that logic to most of the users with outrageous amount of answers, that number would be a lot smaller. And you could stop accepting their questions (as you do for downvoted stuff) after a very bad streak. The easy solution is for users to use their downvotes more (don't you get them back if the content gets deleted?) and filter out the bad content the way it's intended. Everybody is being far too nice for such bad content.

Honestly, I think your proposal takes care of the symptoms, but ignores the actual cause.

Answer 30

I think the law of unintended consequences comes into play here.

From reading the comments of the cappers it seems they want to dissuade people from building high rep cheaply by asking questions for the sake of asking questions.

But if that's your motivation you can fairly easily switch to building rep by answering cheaply - by cheaply I mean as in answering easy duplicates quickly. A brief easy answer to a duplicate is not a high-value contribution.

I don't think you'll get rid of them, and you can't turn them into high-value users.