Would it not be better to add some extra factors to the calculation? For example:

  • Editing privileges: 2000+ rep and at least 50 approved edits with a good edit suggestion approve-deny ratio
  • Create tags: 1500+ rep and at least 50 questions/answers
  • Close voting: 3000+ rep and at least 30 helpful flags
  • Moderator tools: 10.000+ rep and at least 500 questions/answers with a good answer-question ratio

(These are just some examples)

Why am I suggesting this? Because there are plenty of users with a high rep amount, but that still are hardly good contributing users on the site. I'm sure you've all seen the "Golden shot" users which posted 1 lucky answer/question that gets a lot of Google hits, yet they barely contributed otherwhise. Another example are users with 1000+ questions (each with 0-3 upvotes) and only 10 answers. Should help vampires like this really have advanced privileges?

I think that adding these extra requirements to the privileges will help in improving quality on Stack Overflow, since rep can be gained in all kinds of ways which are not really relevant to the privileges that are tied to it.

Instead of adding these new requirements to the current reputation requirement, the rep minimum of the relevant privileges could be lowered or even removed. That way we will gain more reviewers without losing in quality, as the reviewers will already be experienced in the relevant fields.

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    Moderator tools could factor in more than just posts. Possibly edits and votes too. Not sure. Some moderators have different styles of moderation and different preferences, etc. It's all quite complicated. But I like where this is going. Rep-based everything hasn't worked for a long time. – BoltClock Feb 27 '15 at 14:27
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    "good upvote/downvote ratio" - What does this mean? Why can't someone only upvote 50 times or only downvote 50 times? Why do they need to meet a golden ratio? – Andy Feb 27 '15 at 14:34
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    What defines a "good" upvote/downvote ratio? – TZHX Feb 27 '15 at 14:34
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    Someone that only upvotes or only downvotes is more likely to be biased. In order to have advanced privileges, I believe one should have had a taste of both sides and be able to recognize the good and the bad, not just one side. – Praxis Ashelin Feb 27 '15 at 14:36
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    @DarkAshelin Tell that to Eric Lippert. – Jeffrey Bosboom Feb 27 '15 at 14:41
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    That was largely the point of rep. As Jeff Atwood put it: "reputation measures how much the system can trust you". Everybody can interpret it their own way, this is not discouraged :) The rep cap was meant to avoid the "golden shot" problem. If you asked a thousand questions that didn't get destroyed then you clearly have a pretty doggone good idea how the system works. – Hans Passant Feb 27 '15 at 14:41
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    "I think that adding these extra requirements to the privileges will help in improving quality on StackOverflow" - why is that? Do you see a problem where certain users abuse their privileges, thus causing quality degradation of the site, that would be prevented when there are more criteria for earning those privileges? Can you point to specific examples? Otherwise you're battling a non-existent problem here. – CodeCaster Feb 27 '15 at 14:41
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    @JeffreyBosboom - lol. I want to know who got his one solitary upvote. – McNab Feb 27 '15 at 14:45
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    Wouldn't flagging history be more appropriate for the close vote privilege then up/down votes? After all isn't voting to close just the next step up from flagging? Not that I agree with the idea in general – Joe W Feb 27 '15 at 14:45
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    @CodeCaster Yes, without namecalling, I've seen 2000+ rep users abuse their editing privileges to edit answers/questions in a harmful way (changing the meaning for example). Now ofcourse, nothing stops them from being harmful after reaching these "new" requirements for their privileges, but it would indicate they are more trustable in the relevant field. – Praxis Ashelin Feb 27 '15 at 14:52
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    Hmya, sounds to me you still like to interpret rep as a measure for technical prowess. Not uncommon, but that was not the site founder's intention. He was much more concerned with users knowing how to use the site appropriately before giving them sharp-edged tools. If you've managed to add 900 questions that provide value to the site then you're not doing badly. – Hans Passant Feb 27 '15 at 15:41
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    Is there a need for this? Also, just because someone asks lots of questions but has no answers doesn't mean they're bad. Someone could just happen to ask ten really great questions and not provide any answers... they've contributed to the site greatly, just not the way most people do. Sometimes it's harder to ask a good question than it is to provide a good answer. – TylerH Feb 27 '15 at 19:57
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    I do agree with that rep are sometimes not sufficient. I'am taking myself as an example as I could just wait for getting 2k rep in order to make edits directly, but I think that If I didn't suggested many edits that was declined (inline formatting for example) while I thought they were good edits wouldn't help me to improve the quality of my edits. Maybe some users are good enough to make all their edits perfect from the first time! but I think that starting editing only after getting 2000 rep will not really make good editers or good reviewers (for suggested edits) – Tarik Mar 1 '15 at 0:33
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    @Sammaye I don't think 30 helpful flag is a lot, in less than two months I have answered only 69 question and raised 92 helpful flag – Tarik Mar 1 '15 at 2:09

I agree with this in principle, but I see some problems that make this feel like a lot of work for little (if any) gain. Let's look at the new proposed requirements:

  • Editing Privileges (50+ good edits): Having experience editing is a good thing. But how meaningful is that metric when we are constantly fighting robo-reviewers? Also, I'm sure if I put a little effort into it, I could make 50 small edits quickly to game that. If there was a way to measure good, complete and substantive edits I would be all for this. Computers suck at determining that tho.
  • Create Tags (now have 50+ questions and answers): With the rep bar set at 1500, that means that with the minimum number of questions/answers each would have to average a +30 rep gain. Looking at my answer history, most of mine are somewhere between +10 and +20, some lower, some higher. By the time you have worked to 1500+ rep, you probably have enough questions / answers that this becomes irrelevant. The proposed solution would stop those who gain rep solely through editing, but by the time you've made that many edits, you've been here long enough that I can hopefully trust you.
  • Close Voting (30+ helpful flags): No disagreement with the premise here, but by the time you get to that rep level I can determine that you probably care about the site enough to want to help and that you should be able to recognize crap pretty easily. If you have problems recognizing bad posts, that's why reviews take multiple people to approve, so if your crap-o-meter is off one day we should be able to take care of it.
  • Mod Tools (500+ questions and answers): See the point about creating tags. Also this maths out to average +20 rep per post (less than the create tag average).

To me it seems like these new requirements don't really add much. As @HansPassant pointed out in the comments we have a daily rep cap to stop any future "golden shot" users from winning the privilege lottery. He also points out that if someone can ask a ton of good questions (that don't get closed/deleted) and have few answers, they have probably figured out how this all works and are doing a good job of it.

Finally, if there are specific users causing problems, flag a post that they did something inappropriate on for mod attention and explain what you are seeing. No amount of computer code will prevent us from having a few bad eggs slip through and that's why we have mods. Humans can take care of the problems computers can't and this is one of those times.

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    I don't really see how the daily rep cap will stop "Golden shot" users from reaching high rep. A daily rep of +200 still adds up to a lot, considering that these lucky answers/questions are most likely getting lots of google hit traffic which spans over a long time, not just 1 day. – Praxis Ashelin Feb 27 '15 at 16:16
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    @DarkAshelin Fair enough, but to hit 10,000 rep at 200 per day would take 50 days of max upvoting. Since a question with an answer like that will probably drop off the front page rather quickly (since the presence of that kind of answer will probably discourage new answers). In my experience after a question drops off the font page, most voting seems to slow down tremendously. A post may garner an upvote here and there from google traffic, but I can't imagine a question so hot from google that would generate 20 upvotes per day for 50 days. – Becuzz Feb 27 '15 at 17:05
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    @DarkAshelin In any case, this is such a small subset of the population that I can't see it justifying the effort to make the additions, let alone the meta posts having to explain to someone why they don't have privilege X, etc. I'd also say that most people probably aren't going to actively try to do malicious or harmful things. For those that do, we have mods to handle it. – Becuzz Feb 27 '15 at 17:07
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    Maybe it's just the fact that we discuss these kind of users (10k+ rep with only 10 answers) in the chatroom often that causes me to believe there are a considerable amount of them, because I see their profiles pass by quote often. – Praxis Ashelin Feb 27 '15 at 18:03
  • @DarkAshelin Probably. The people active in chatrooms and meta are far more likely to have higher rep (because they care enough to stick around). Also, looking at my profile I have ~3500 rep and it says I'm in the top 11% overall. If that is accurate, I can't image there are a ton of 10k+ users. – Becuzz Feb 27 '15 at 18:21
  • @Becuzz - profile has table of user (when you click on that "11% overall" link) - current numbers - 10,000+ (rep)- 7,032 (users). – Alexei Levenkov Mar 2 '15 at 7:59
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    Golden shot user that has been completely unaffected by cap. That's right, there's no Mortarboard on that profile. One question, no login for six years, less than a year from 20k. Good times. – Nathan Tuggy Mar 2 '15 at 8:25
  • @NathanTuggy that question is 6 years old - if you actually look at his rep/day gain it's 10 to 20 a day, quite far from the rep cap. – Aify Mar 2 '15 at 18:42
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    @DarkAshelin Once you remove the rep requirements what purpose does rep serve anymore? Merely a somewhat arbitrary measure of how much people liked your answers? Also, you have now substituted one simple, straightforward and well understood path to obtaining privileges with many. Many paths mean many things to deal with, from bugs to meta posts / arguments over whether an edit was a "good" one or not, etc. – Becuzz Mar 2 '15 at 19:05
  • @DarkAshelin I like the idea of practicing something before we give you free reign to do it more or less unsupervised, but I feel like it is going to get overly complicated and destroy what is already a very simple and clear system. – Becuzz Mar 2 '15 at 19:05
  • @Becuzz Simple systems are not always better than more detailed ones. I feel the detailed / more complex system would be more accurate than the generalized / simple one. – Praxis Ashelin Mar 2 '15 at 19:48
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    @Aify: Yes, that was my point, thank you: this user has, on the strength of a single dubiously-impressive question, gained well-nigh full privileges without the rep cap doing the first thing to slow that down, never mind stop it. The rep cap therefore cannot be relied on to prevent "golden shots". If you look at the graph, it's even worse, since the majority of rep gained is in the last 3-4 years! – Nathan Tuggy Mar 3 '15 at 0:28

I don't like those:


    I didn't like my suggestions to be reviewed, so I have never suggested any edit to a question or answer (my 3 only suggestions are for tag wikis).

    After I gained the privilege with my reputation, I have been able to improve StackOverflow by doing 1346 edits.


    I didn't realize that I could flag for closure until I gained the privilege. I thought flagging was only for posts that needed to be removed, and it's difficult finding posts like those when you don't have access to moderation tools.

    Therefore, the first time I voted to close, I only had 3 flags (all helpful).

    In fact, by the time I had 30 helpful flags, I had voted to close 114 times.

Of course, that's only my personal experience, so may be biased. But I think the same applies to other people.

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    Moreover, I don't know what "good answer-question ratio" means. I could be against that too. – Oriol Feb 28 '15 at 23:13
  • I think the OP has a good idea though you did bring up a good point with it. I don't think you are alone with your edit statistics like that. – Turnerj Mar 2 '15 at 1:35
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    About the edit privileges I think Tarik's comment sums up my own thoughts pretty well. – Praxis Ashelin Mar 2 '15 at 9:09

I suppose the question about whether this should be done can be considered more generically, rather than on a per-privilege basis:

Of all the users that this would affect (i.e. users with current privileges that would lose them in the change), how many of them are actively making using to the feature the privilege unlocks?

Then, of all those users that it would affect, how many of them are doing a bad job with their privileges? How many of them are (for instance) close-voting questions that shouldn't be close-voted?

Finally, of those that are abusing the privileges, how many of those issues are making it "live"? i.e. how many of their close-votes are causing items to close unnecessarily?

Bottom line, you can take months to come up with the most effective and logical requirements for each privilege, but if it is only stopping 10 people from doing things they shouldn't be, is it worth the effort? Or are there ways to deal with it in the current system?

  • I've added an update to my suggestion which could increase the benefit we gain from the system. – Praxis Ashelin Mar 2 '15 at 18:19

My comments here are the result of three random events:
(1) This topic happened to be showing in the right-hand column and (2) I happened to notice it. The significance of this coincidence for me is that (3) I recently asked to have my account closed on another Stack for the very topic this thread is discussing.

In the last few years, I started seeing Stack Overflow showing up in my google searches whilst looking for answers to various computer/programming issues I was facing. I had changed the languages I was programming in and wasn't able to refer directly to the forums I used in the past.

Forum based search engines (vBulletin being an exception) have not impressed me, so these days I always use google as my starting point and the results lead me to Stack Exchange threads. Over time, I have developed a perception in MY mind that this was a good forum for answers. But I've also found that posting (ie contributing) in a Stack Exchange is a daunting experience.

From my google searches, I find posts marked as duplicates or off-topic way too often. These posts are marked so prominently that I feel its a demerit. This makes me uncomfortable and reluctant to participate. I don't spam and I do my homework beforehand, but I'm afraid of having overlooked a thread that happened to use different terminology to ask the same thing, or not be precise enough and leave room for opinions. I don't want my contributions annotated in such a way.

Why is google presenting me with the "Duplicated" thread instead of the 'master'? Or "Off-topic" threads in a Stack, when there are supposedly other places where they're discussed? It tells me there's something wrong in the way the forum is managed. Google doesn't use reputation, it uses hits, relevance, and other objective measures to determine its output.

My contributions are based on the issues I'm having at the time. If I open a question, I continue to do my research in parallel. If I find an answer before someone else offers one, I post it to close my own question. If I find an answer given that is incomplete, incorrect, or has changed over time, I provide the necessary updated information. (In fact the reason behind my request to have my account removed has so do an 'update' edit I did that was rejected by persons unknown to me.) I'll be frank and state that I don't scan the 'most recent' questions list or such like. Albeit Google is far from perfect.

The implementation of Reputation to control the quality of the content within the forum is misguided. It should not determine what you can and can't do. Reputation means reputation, not rank. And what Stack Exchange have implemented is a ranking system.

The manner in which the ranking system is implemented is counter productive:

  • A new person to the forum can post an answer, but can't make a comment? Where is the logic in that?
  • Anyone can edit a post another member makes, and if two other members accept the edit, the original author has no say it it (let alone be notified). Who determines the suitability and qualifications of the 'peers' who review proposed edits? What right do they have on the subject? Shouldn't the author have a say? Go figure!?!?
  • Someone comes along and down votes your question/answer, without offering anything constructive...
  • All this, yet you can't post a comment until you have 50 reputation..... It's not easy to attain 50 reputation points when you don't suffer from verbal diarrhoea or megalomania.
  • To compound these Reputation problems, though your login details are transferable between Stack Exchanges, your reputation is not. So you can't make comments on other forums.

The reputation system is wrought with frustrations. In my opinion, the person who set out the specifications for the software didn't have enough foresight into its intended use and eventual implications. I think the OP is on the money in asking this question.

From what I gather, Stacks are about information and that should be the focus. Gamification belongs in games. It's been introduced into general marketing because marketing people are jealous of the behaviour patterns people exhibit when playing games and are trying figure out a way to make money from it. It doesn't work in the real world and only fools fall for it.

A Thank you button would suffice, and I would click it every time I benefited from the information. To inflate the your member's egos, you could post the number times thanked where their reputation currently shows. Personally, I would be happy to see who thanked me for what (and who I thanked) in my own profile panel.

Each thread could have a counter that shows the number of times its been visited (Robots excluded) to give an approximate indication of the popularity of the thread.

Within each thread, up/down votes on answers could be based on a weighting system say 100%. But this too detracts from quality and just hides the severity of down votes.

I'm sure others have more ideas on how things could be done to promote quality.

As for my contributions, your system has beaten them out of me. From here on in, I'm just a leech.

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    Virtually none of what you've discussed in this answer seems to be relevant to the topic at hand. If you don't think google should index closed questions, there are meta questions discussing it, but this isn't one of them. If you think that the quality standards are too high, there are places to discuss that, but this isn't one of them. If you think that new users should be able to comment right away there are places to discuss that, but this isn't one of them. You get the idea. – Servy Mar 2 '15 at 19:36
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    I'm afraid I have to agree with @Servy. While I get your point (You agree with the suggestion and add some examples/anecdotes why rep alone is a bad ranking system) most of this is not very relevant to the discussion at hand. The answers here should better discuss what the benefits or drawbacks of the suggestion would be, rather than why the current system is bad. It can ofcourse be included in your answer, but it should be kept relevant enough. Right now you stray too much from the "just rep is bad" and go towards "the system here is bad" and just end up ranting. – Praxis Ashelin Mar 2 '15 at 19:45
  • @Servy, on the contrary, the closed questions are providing the answers I need, please don't remove them. My search criteria lead me to them. Had I not found them, I would have to continue searching. The point I'm making is that they shouldn't have been closed in the first place. This, in my opinion, is a reflection of the 'quality' the OP is discussing. And leads to my comments about the mechanics of the Rep System. – gone Mar 2 '15 at 20:09
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    Regardless, it's still completely off topic for this question. This question is about the potential for privileges to be granted by criteria other than rep. You aren't discussing that at all, but rather ranting about a large number of unrelated problems you have with the site. What those problems are doesn't make them any less off topic. – Servy Mar 2 '15 at 20:11
  • I'm a casual user of Stacks, as probably many others are. I'm not interested in sub-contracting moderator's roles, I'm interested in the information content, which is what's useful to me. A rant is an expression of frustration about a particular circumstance, and I stand by my rant as the circumstance is infuriating. Perhaps I have a rather narrow view of the Rep System compared to the others who're posting in this thread. But I explained the circumstances that lead me to posting here, and they are related to the Rep System. – gone Mar 2 '15 at 20:16
  • If this is an inhouse discussion, then you're missing what those in the wider world are thinking. Enough said... good luck. – gone Mar 2 '15 at 20:16

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