What is the purpose of reputation on ELU?

Question

Recently, it seems to be de rigueur to say that reputation is not important. To a certain extent, I agree. I have a long list of things to worry about and work on, and my rep on ELU isn't high on the list -- much lower than working on my drop-shot. But I admit to a mild thrill when I passed 15,000 and I promptly protected a question because I could -- and it needed protection.

I play tennis a lot, and it is always more fun to keep score. I don't play with people who think winning is more important than having fun, or friendship, or everyone feeling good at the end of the match. But just rallying for two hours without keeping score is, somehow, boring, and we never do it.

And keeping score in tennis is less important (at my level) than rep on SE, because a pro can tell in five minutes what level one is at and who would good partners.

So why do we keep score on ELU, if we distain it so much?

Two recent examples of disregard for rep, as requested by @Josh:

Comments under Etiquette with regard to Downvotes

Comments under The antithesis of a serious problem: What do you do when you have hit 200 daily rep with hours to go, and have a good answer to a new question?

Answer 1

Well, you know, the help center says:

Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you; it is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you’re talking about.

And scorekeeping keeps this Q&A wonder exciting and competitive and stuff as well.

Point of the whole "we don't care about reputation points" from senior users is to remind others that there comes a time when you get past that excitement (probably around 20k to 25k), and gaining further reputation points won't give them extra super powers, so when they post something, they are posting it purely for the sake of contributing to the community, and not for gaining more imaginary points, or at least, that's my take on it.

Answer 2

NVZ's answer is correct and based on the principles of Stack Exchange, but my thoughts are too long to post in comments, so I'll add them as an answer.

1. Let's face it, earning reputation is fun. As English Student pointed out in a comment, the site is designed to be gamified, and especially for users new to the site, there is a certain thrill to unlocking new privileges and reaching milestones.

2. Speaking of privileges, reputation milestones for unlocking new privileges are carefully balanced so as to allow users who are committed to the site to perform necessary tasks involved in managing the various review tasks. There are other models for managing an open community, and Wikipedia is a good example. Wikipedia gives some very senior users special privileges, but on most pages, anyone can edit, even without logging in. The result is that it takes a vast group of serious and committed users to constantly monitor activity and remove vandalism and unproductive edits. The model works well for Wikipedia because it has a massive user base all dedicated to a single site. EL&U, on the other hand, is one of many sites on the Stack Exchange network, and it simply wouldn't be practical to allow any user to perform review tasks without regard for their experience on the site.

3. As NVZ's answer points out, reputation gives users some idea of how much a user is trusted. Posts should be judged on their merit, not on the reputation of the poster, but for some visitors to the site, a post's merit might be difficult to judge, particularly if they are looking for an answer to a question and land on EL&U by searching. Voting provides the best measure of particular post's accuracy, but there's an element of usefulness to knowing how experienced a user is on the site, particularly for visitors from other sites on the network who understand how reputation works but are unfamiliar with the members and customs of EL&U.

Having given these reasons in favor of the usefulness of reputation, I will also agree that reputation shouldn't be taken too seriously. Getting caught up in earning reputation can get in the way of providing quality answers and contributing to the site in other ways.

Answer 3

One very important reason we have reputation points is to spend them. There are two main ways to spend them: bounties, and downvoting bad answers.

With 15.2K rep you could give a prize to over 300 answers you thought were particular excellent.

With 15.2K rep you could also downvote 15K answers you thought were particularly bad and potentially misleading. With over 200 thousand answers on this site it probably wouldn't be very hard to find 15 thousand misleading ones!

Answer 4

NVZ has already hit the nail on the head in the earlier answer by making the pertinent point that

(...) Point of the whole "we don't care about reputation points" from senior users is to remind others that there comes a time when you get past that excitement (...)

It is sad but true that I have already 'got past the excitement stage' as the plateau in my reputation graph within the last 10 days illustrates:

I remember I myself commented to Ben Kovitz's answer at ab2's earlier meta question (about 200 rep cap) that

[extracts] "(...) I think of it this way: my time is luckily my own, and I should probably be choosing those activities that both capture [attract & retain] my interest and give me gratification -- if asking, answering and discussing English at ELU were stressful or boring why I should continue? as we Indians say -- in fact I think the motivation is not really reputation points, but most likely the linguistic kicks (...)

what attracts me to ELU is the focused interaction built around the intricacies of the English language (which I love) -- and I like it so much: thats why I spend a lot of time here! The fundamental enjoyment of linguistic discussion and debate is only helped by reputation,which cannot replace the basic satisfaction derived from the interesting activity."

I believe this activity should be intrinsically satisfying independent of points, which it currently is, for me. I have become rather more discerning in submitting answers and would no longer do anything solely for collecting rep points.

Again, we should be well aware that StackOverflow sites were designed according to game theory in order to engage users in a friendly competition where good participation is rewarded by reputation points so that members remain interested to keep contributing good answers.

Good quality posts are rewarded with upvotes that get translated into reputation points, which is a positive reinforcement to modulate and encourage useful behavior -- so, as high-reputation member Josh has rightly said in comments, what counts is the quality of the questions and answers!

Answer 5

What should be the purpose of reputation on SE?

Your (real) Score.

I.e., use as a metric in an algorithm that divides your reputation by your total post count and somehow fudges that number with page views, so as to get an accurate representation of your signal to noise ratio.

"People reached" is meaningless.

It should be, People Who Upvoted This Post, divided by People Who Loaded the Page, contrasted against Your Total Number of Posts and Your Tenure.

As the badge suggests, people who are tenacious don't care about rep. It's all those FGitWers at +100k, who IMO, reached that level in one of two ways: being a FGitW, or being literally tenacious (or both). Or the third way: have a 6 or 7 year tenure and just slub along.

If you get just one upvote every day for seven years, that's over 25k worth of rep. Without a viable metric, and without DVs (-2) carrying the same weight as UVs (+10), reputation, as a datum unto itself, is useless.