(Personal opinion, not official anything.)

I'm one of the people who, from the beginning, wanted to change how we handle reputation, because while Someplace Else got some things right with it, their setup also produced some degenerate results that I don't want to replicate.

The biggest problem, IMO, was tying privileges to raw reputation without looking deeper. On one of the sites I used to moderate, we fairly often saw poor answers on popular questions shoot up in (net) votes, and one-time posters suddenly had privileges they didn't really know how to use. This created extra work for community curators. We were keen to not repeat that mistake here at Codidact, and we now have an abilities system that ignores reputation and instead looks at the underlying actions -- your posts, suggested edits, and flags. For the purpose of abilities, an answer at net +5 counts the same as one at net +500; we're looking for "positive" and aren't measuring how positive. We think that someone who contributes ten positive answers has shown more fluency than someone with a single very popular answer.

So great, we've done that -- abilities are decoupled from reputation. What, then, of reputation?

I'm not opposed to having a single "bragging rights" number, whether it's called reputation or score or karma or something else. Communities that want to display it can; those that don't can omit it or even turn it off entirely. And I hear the requests for different weightings; not all post types in all categories are created equal. We currently allow communities to set the rep gain/loss for votes on each post type, without regard to category. That's an artifact of the original architecture, before we added categories, and I grant that it is not ideal. I'd like to be able to allow better, but still simple, configuration of this bragging-rights number. I'd like to replace the current rep configuration with a matrix: categories on one axis, post types on the other, rep for upvotes and downvotes within. This would allow a community to say that papers are worth more than blog posts even though they're both articles, remove downvote penalties on meta because working out policies and such inherently involves posting unpopular options for voting, remove rep from a sandbox entirely, and so on.

If we make rep more configurable in this way, I would want us to agree that this is the only way to gain or lose rep. It's about bragging rights from the posts you contribute, as another answer argues. All of the other valuable contributions people make to a community (edits, curation, etc) fall outside the rep system, to avoid diluting its signal and to avoid making the code even more complex.

posted almost 4 years ago

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Monica Cellio‭ staff

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