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Comment by farmerbuzz | Hacker News Reader

Are you using the site for reputation or to spread knowledge? If its the former then you're welcome to leave, if its the latter then why do you care about reputation?

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The fact that points on SO actually unlock admin and moderation features on the site gives them real value. I don't care at all about my Reddit karma, but if it meant I could eventually retitle misleading posts I would.

Reputation is also a currency. You can use it to get [better] answers to questions. 50 points is the minimum so it can go fast.

I think that's a place where Wikipedia presents a better model in a lot of ways. People love to complain about its cliquey admin groups, but the fact is they're extremely effective at getting quality content out there.

Bottom line, I think, is that forcing people to discuss (not just summarily up or downvote) is really important to getting meaningful content. It's fairly easy to see when someone is talking out of their ass, but it's much harder to get a read on how intelligent an anonymous (or even attributed) vote is.

Can't it be both?

Gaining reputation points is a wonderful short-term incentive for contributing. Otherwise why waist time instead of working on something fun? (and good answers take a lot to write)

Reputation and other points systems are designed to attract people because it's like a game - in fact, this very site uses it!

Obviously there's the problem of people "gaming the system" to earn more reputation and you do whatever is possible to prevent that, but there's no reason why people can't be there for both the reputation points game AND to spread knowledge. The problem now for Stack Overflow (as I see it) is that it's reached a level of saturation where it's difficult to do either.

Do you have a job for money or to feel satisfied and useful? If it's the former, then you can't complain about being made to do menial work or how you're treated. If it's the latter, then you can't complain about being underpaid. Because, yeah, life is full of false dichotomies like yours ;-)

When I found it, StackOverflow seemed like a good "portfolio" site. The goal wouldn't be to answer the most possible question but answer and ask questions which would give a potential employer some idea concerning my skill, knowledge and preferences. But having at least 1k+ Karma seemed like a reasonable part. I was annoyed with question-Karma reduction since it seemed to cut into that goal, even if my Karma never actually went back below 1k.

He cares about incentivizing people to ask great questions, and some people see reputation as an incentive. Therefore he cares about reputation.

edit: to clarify, I mean he cares about how reputation is handled, not necessarily about his own reputation.

If I cared most about reputation, I wouldn't have been asking questions in the Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp groups, for example. As you can see, you don't necessarily get a lot of points for asking or answering questions in an esoteric section.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz...

I had around 90 questions when I quit. The way the game was set up, you always got a lot more points for answering questions, then getting them upvoted. In general, you are going to get more votes in the most popular topics.

Reputation is also a currency. You can spend it to get better answers to your questions, 50 points minimum. My reputation was probably between 2300-2500 before the devaluation. I guess I would have lost half? Not sure. At any rate, where StackOverFlow could have been really interesting is moving beyond the simple questions and solving specific, but a more complicated, questions. If you don't take the time to be specific, someone will just give you a link to another site. That gets upvoted a few times and your question is done.

Hopefully, someone will come up with a better model. I'd do it without rep, but I like the economy aspect. I think it draws in people. People will game it, so design the model to get the desired results: Great questions and great answers.

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