Actually Codidact should support rep better than it does now. Most of the dislike of rep seems to come from a misunderstanding of its purpose. It's not to show who is "better" somehow, but a measure of how much someone has contributed useful content to the site as judged by all the other users.

Your arguments should be your support in a constructive debate, not reputation

Right. Rep has nothing to do with validity of arguments. However, it might give a sense of trustworthiness when other direct metrics aren't available. In that sense it works like reputation in the real world.

Let's say you like reading horror stories, and there are a bunch of book in front of you to pick one from next. You've never heard of any of the authors, then you notice one by Steven King. You've read and liked his works before. You pick that one because his reputation suggests that you are more likely to enjoy that book than a randomly chosen one.

Trust Levels seem to be a better way (established by upvoted answers and the like) but showing a title rather than a flashy number.

But "established by upvoted answers and the like" is this reputation you don't like. Even if you don't want to show it, the system still needs to calculate and track it in this scheme. The only difference is that you want to show one result of that rep score instead of the score itself, but haven't explained how that is supposed to help.

Making it a repo game would lead to lower quality answers and questions as the primary aim would be points, not for spreading knowledge.

Wrong. Gamification means people will want to do those things that they get rewards for. If you've chosen the incentives correctly, then they'll be doing exactly what you want them to do, which is mostly providing high quality answers. Remember, the quality of these answers will be judged by everyone else, so they have to be good to get those points you don't like. Giving out free internet points with some recognition seems like a pretty easy way to incentivize people to contribute good content to a site.

People who want to answer questions (and are knowledgable) really need no 'fake internet points' as an incentive

This is hopelessly idealistic and naive at best. People do things for a reason. There is no such thing as pure altruism. Some people may feel internally rewarded by helping others, but there is always some reward or reason. Few people are going to spend the significant free time you need from them to provide good content with nothing in return. Giving them a little recognition for all the volunteer help is doesn't cost you anything.

What you are basically advocating is that volunteers should come here to contribute their time and expertise for free, and not even be thanked or recognized for doing so.

having a trust system would work pretty well giving them extra privileges

Privileges are different from public recognition. Privileges might be an incentive for some, but isn't going to be as powerful as public recognition for many.

I know from personal experience on EE.SE (I was #1 with about 280 k rep when I left there in 2018), privileges weren't much of a driver. I found some privileges useful, but didn't use others much at all. When I got a new privilege it was more of a surprise, and wasn't what I was aiming for. My thought was more "that's cool, maybe that will be useful some day".

Rep, on the other hand, made things competitive. We couldn't have Andy or Spehro with higher rep than me. I mean, geesh, that would tear up the fabric of space-time and end the universe as we know it. Can't let that happen.

while not signifying that they are all-knowing.

Right, and rep doesn't do that. It's a measure of appreciated and useful contributions.

posted over 3 years ago

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Olin Lathrop‭

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