It was made evident on the Stack Overflow question  and many others that people with famous names in their fields answer questions and (granted are usually correct) get an insane number of upvotes for their answer that other people with lower reputation points also post. I can't help that feel that a well known name basically means extra reputation points earned for every answer. Part of me wants to say that there should be some form of bottleneck on reputation: as you gain more you gain less. Then you can have people on 5k answering questions and getting good reputation from it while big names with 50-100k can answer a question, still get reputation point, but the mental number of upvotes for simply being a big name won't tip the scales too much. Edit: So for all the people that decided to downvote my discussion on this point here is  talking about it:  Jakob, I actually do think you have a point. There is a slight bias towards high-reputation users (I wouldn't really call them &quot;famous&quot;). In my experience, however, the most important factors are speed and correctness, sometimes with far too much emphasis on speed. See  for a discussion of this phenomenon, which I consider far more serious than the slight bias towards high-reputation users. – Sven Marnach 2 hours ago
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I have noticed a couple of kinds of behavior that seem to crop up in the SO community, and it really seems to artificially boost reputation. There may not be a solution (or it may not be a problem!) but here are some thoughts.  The first is the fact that "celebrity" users, or users with lots of reputation, are treated significantly better than others. Take Joel Spolsky's most recent question:    It was closed, opened, closed, and re-opened. And the question has earned Joel - what - 1030 reputation 103 votes, and lots of reputation! Wow! I'm not saying that Joel's question is a bad one. But lets compare to other questions that one might consider to be in the same equivalence class - easily answerable, specific questions, short questions:   (5 votes)   (5 votes)  If you look at the , I can hardly find any which are specific technical questions. So that Joel's question was so upvoted could only mean that:   It was upvoted based on his celebrity People have been interpreting the questions as a sort of zen-like wakeup call, designed to get people talking and thinking about they way they vote.   I do not mean any disrespect toward Joel, and again, I think his question was a good one. This post isn't about Joel! But the boost in reputation did not (imho) mean "Joel is really good at programming, and he has earned my trust as someone knowledgeable about computers." It may be true that Joel is a proficient computer expert, but not based on the merit of that one question.  Which leads me to an example about myself. I recently gave  (130 reputation) to a question about PHP's image-creating libraries. I am very appreciative of the community's support for my answer - an answer which I believe was well-thought and that I put effort into.  At the same time I can't look someone and tell them, with a straight face, that my reputation is a great reflection of my computer-related knowledge. Billions of people on the net have created tutorials for PHP's GD image library - I just happened to be the person to post a few of them. Heck if I know why it got 13 votes! (oh, but please don't downvote it!!)  SO is built by the community - so the community absolutely gets to decide what questions are important, and how they choose to dispense reputation. But in practice, I feel like peoples' reputation would be much lower if the community were more discriminating about the way they voted.  So: am I totally off base here? Is this even something that can be corrected with a different reputation algorithm? Or am I the only one who sees this as a detriment to the SO community?  (And, to be completely clear, I do not intend for this to be an ad hominem, and I am not jealous about not having a higher reputation. But I do take reputation with a grain of salt, in part for these reasons, and I thought I'd bring it up! It is meta, after all!)
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The  on the StackOverflow blog says that badges are there &quot;to encourage positive behavior&quot;. So, why not giving each user some reputation points for each badge? Maybe with differences: a &quot;woot&quot; badge would mean 100 points, while a &quot;scholar&quot; badge would give 10 points to the user. -- Edit: someone pointed out that you already gain some reputation implicitly when you get a Badge. That's false for 90% of badges: Woot -&gt; no rep earned Autobiographer -&gt; no rep earned Beta -&gt; no rep earned Citizen Patrol -&gt; no rep earned Civic Duty -&gt; no rep earned Cleanup -&gt; no rep earned Commentator -&gt; no rep earned Critic -&gt; no rep earned Disciplined -&gt; no rep earned Editor -&gt; no rep earned Fanatic -&gt; no rep earned ...
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Sometimes a comment can add great value to an answer once its content has been incorporated into the answer. Perhaps correcting an error to an otherwise good answer, plugging a logic hole, rendering a more elegant solution, making an important clarification to explanations, etc.  Once the answer has incorporated the comment/suggestion, it would be nice to credit the commenter with a "slice of the pie" - ie share reputation gains between the answerer and the commenter, as recognition of their contribution as "co author" to the final answer.  The simplest way would be to make upvotes on comments yield reputation, but that barrow has been pushed before.  A few possibilities I could think of for sharing rep are:   The commenter can be added to the answer as a "reputation sharer" - reputation gains from the answer are split 50/50 from then on The answerer can make a "donation" of reputation from the answer to the commenter - eg if the answer has 4 votes, they can donate up to 40 reputation (there may have to be a requirement that this donation comes off the rep cap, so answerers don't distribute their excess rep when exceeding their rep cap) Upvotes made by the answerer to comments on the answer do get reputation (maybe 5 - transferred as per previous point)     Why bounty doesn't quite fit:  The bounty process is just too long winded and doesn't have an on-going effect if the answer turns out to be a really good one. The bounty is too delayed. They didn't answer, they just added value - I just want to give the comenter a pat on the back right there and then, and I don't mind giving up some erep to do it.
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There seems to be a deluge of questions by folks with rep of 1-10. Many of these questions are "homework" or questions that are annoying to me "please read my 500 line script and tell me whats wrong with it" Is there any way to filter questions by reputation?
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I noticed that the reputation from the main site carried over to meta on Gaming (at least the first upvote), I guess that doesn't work the other way around, right?  Is it then impossible to have a meta reputation higher than the site reputation?
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The Famous Question badge is awarded for question with 10.000 views.   I've seen questions with negative scores to be used as a reference to golden Famous Question badges. Why isn't there an additional requirement to have positive score on that question?  Is the intention of this badge to indicate helpful and interesting question or just number of views?
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Why is it that people who have low reputation on Stack Overflow have to wait 20 minutes per question asked? I am trying to teach myself python programming and head the club at school - this website has been a magnificent resource. But, as I work on a problem the issues often come up quickly - so once more, what is the reason for the wait.   As an extra question, why is it that the limit is applied to IP addresses instead of accounts?
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(Posted here as probably applies to all sites).  I was examining my reputation gain yesterday on Stack Overflow: 190. I believe I should have hit the 200 cap. Mainly due to         Respectively, I had 10, 7, 3, and 2 upvotes on those questions alone. There are a couple of other minnows in the list but the above alone should enable me to hit the cap.  There was a user removed sometime yesterday which knocked off 10 points (and possibly accounts for the disparity) but I think (1) the cap should have been recalibrated and (2) I answered (3) after this event before turning in for the night.  I checked all the usual suspects: the reputation graph on your profile and  the achievements tab, but they are all showing 190.
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How is this possible that the user with  question only has that little reputation? I've checked his site and he doesn't have a lot of downvotes or bounties.
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I've only been a member of SO for a couple of months but I must say that the site can be a bit daunting even for an experienced developer.  Part of this is because when users with very high reputations answer questions then it seems that everyone assumes that they have the right answer.  I don't want to go into the self-fulfilling nature of reputation increase for high reputation people.  But I think it is clear that people with high reputation scores get more upvotes () because people assume (usually accurately) that they are correct.    But if reputation was hidden on SO, at least for, say, the first hour after a question is asked then the probability of the best answer being upvoted the most would surely increase.  This might also require the hiding of the names of the answerers if they have very high reps!  As a second method of getting improved answers I would correlate the value of an answer (in terms of reputation gained) with the difficulty of the question.  And the simplest way to do that would be based on the time required for the question to be answered.  So if a question is answered within a minute then it is a 20% question (2 points per upvote), within 2 minutes a 40% question, within 5 minutes a 60% question and so on, on to say a 200% answer (20 points per upvote) on questions that have been hanging around for months.  This would encourage considered answers to new questions and tempt people into reducing the backlog - rather than encouraging people to sit on the 'newest questions' hoping for a gimme.  These two measures would incentivise people to answer the questions that no-one likes the look of and reduce the relative value of answering easy questions.
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I understand that reputation can be gained by answering questions. However, it seems that more often than not the questions do not contain all the required information to give an answer. Since new users can not comment questions and ask for more details, this creates a sort of catch-22.  Any good advice on how to get initial reputation, given the new user restrictions?
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As a new user, I find it impossible to contribute to the community or to even begin contributing. I know why the reputation system is in place and I respect it, but at the same time it is too hard on new users.  It started with me wanting to upvote a question...     "Vote Up requires 15 reputation"   Just to appreciate a good question that helped me I need 15 rep? OK..., so I find out how I can get reputation points. More or less, I need to ask a question for +5 and add an answer for +10. I don't have any questions at the moment and I don't want to spam a random question, but I did happen to have a slightly different answer to the earlier question that I wanted to upvote. So I try to answer...     This question is protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. To answer it, you must have earned at least 10 reputation on this site.   Now... I know this doesn't apply to every question, but at the same time, this means I'm forced to answer yet another question, and I don't want to go around looking for random questions and spam irrelevant answers...  Now I'm stuck. So I try to talk to some other users in the chat rooms about how to go about getting reputation points and how they first started. I entered into a "casual chat room".     You must have 20 reputation on Meta Stack Overflow to talk here.   Yes... I can understand why this is enforced, because we don't want new users to spam chat rooms, but all I wanted to do was ask for help. So I can't even talk to anyone about my newbie problems. So okay, I'll just settle for upvoting comments in the question that helped me. I don't see an upvote hover-over button so I can't even do that.    So now I'm stuck at 1 reputation point, unable to cross that 15 rep barrier, and even after posting this question I'll only have 6 rep points and still unable to do anything, and I'll be forced to look for questions to answer. Yes, I should be contributing to the community, but I shouldn't need to begin answering or making questions to upvote questions and answers. This only spurs more spam/irrelevant answers if anything.   Very, very, very new-user unfriendly.
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Why is this limit there? (Jeff just says  that he won't increase the limit.)  Some users have cases where they need to ask a few separate questions. And also if they are related, I thought that it is a good policy to try to post separate questions separately as much as possible (e.g. as discussed ).  So I asked these questions:      (10k only)  (10k only)     And I have some more (mostly unrelated) questions to ask.  I think it is quite common to have many questions when you enter a new area (in my case Windows+MSVC).  A related discussion is on the . Most people are saying there that too many questions are not a problem.  Another related discussion (evolved from the answers here) is .  In any case, I think all of my questions are of value to the community and I would like to put some more questions on SO. And I don't really see why that is bad for SO.  Maybe the limit should be dependent on reputation? Or completely absent at some reputation limit?
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I have noticed that questions are sometimes protected to prevent "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. In order to answer those questions, you must have earned more than 10 reputation on the site.  But what if a new user has managed to gain more than 10 reputation in a single day, and then tried to post this kind of answer?  Shouldn't we make the rep requirement for answering protected questions even higher? Say 50 rep?
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I've found a trend that I'd like to discuss. There are users that have reached 15K+ reputation that are participating in a question and then protecting it so that low reputation users can't answer. This wouldn't be a problem if the question was attracting poor, low quality or spam answers from these low reputation users. However, in these cases, that's not what's happening.  The  privilege has the following guideline:     Questions should be protected when they are garnering lots of views and newbies are adding "me too!", "thanks!" and possibly even spam non-answers.   Some recent examples to consider:     This Q&amp;A are by the same user. There are no deleted answers on the question. (14 views)   This Q&amp;A are by the same user. There is a second answer that is not the highest of quality, but the user has 200+ reputation and wouldn't be affected by the protection anyway. (23 views)  This question was protected by the author of the only answer. There are no competing answers. (36 views)  This question was protected by the author of the only answer. There are no competing answers. (37 views)  This question was protected by the author of the only answer. There are no competing answers. (50 views)  This question was protected by the author of the only answer. There are no competing answers. (64 views)  This question was protected by the author of the question (not the answer). There is only one answer. (140 views)   Proposal  I'd like to propose a couple small changes to how a user can protect a question:  The question should not be able to be protected if all of the following are true   Has less a low number of views. We use 100 views to determine when . I think 100 would work here too. None of the posts have garnered low quality or spam flags None of the answers have a score less than 0 The user protecting the question is a participant   If any of those criteria are no longer true, then the participants should be able to protect it normally. I worked with  to spot check the flags on the above posts. There are not any low quality or spam flags.  This means that the final question in my example would be able to be protected by both participants.  If you haven't answered the question, you would be able to protect a question as normal. The idea is that the author of the question or answers can't protect if if the other three criteria are true  Motivation  The idea is to prevent locking out low reputation users from these questions. They are not gathering the types of answers mentioned in the  that require a post to be protected. Instead, it looks like a conflict of interest. The user protecting the post is one of the users that can benefit the most from preventing competing answers.
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See this:        Jon Skeet got 1505 reputation gain, while the other user got only 1500. How come Jon is not first?
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I've had a few concerns over a new form of &quot;spam&quot; - that is, through voting. A while back, I had seen some wild reputation increases to my account, amongst others, that seemingly felt weird - as I've barely participated in asking questions or providing answers. Earlier today, this sentiment was echoed by another user in chat:  and like 250 this month? it seems like someone is spam upvoting  This was another user that saw a 250 rep increase, but has been inactive for quite a while. For a site that hasn't seen more than 5 questions a day, that was really weird. To put things even more out of hand, it seems like each vote has been placed on a question.  I did some investigation of my own, and it seems like I've found a badge hunter. More of a... gold badge hunter. This user is among the top 3 voters of the site. Looking into this user's profile, this user only has under 200 rep, and has posted a single question, which was received differently. One thing caught my eye:  Votes all time              by type 581   up              535    question 1     down            47     answer   Each vote is an up vote (with the exception of one), and there are 535 up votes on questions. There are 535 questions in the entire site. Using reputation stats from user profiles, I came with the conclusion that these votes are...  Done within a short period of time. 5 question votes within a couple of minutes Done in [near] perfect chronological order: The earlier the vote, the earlier the question was asked. As if the user had gone through the list of questions in order, and placed an up vote on each one.   I see this as incredibly problematic. First:  It dangerously inflates reputation. Votes are not done based on their content, but simply for voting. Therefore, reputation loses it value as a way to measure expertise.  It's like serial up voting. Generally, when we hear the term &quot;serial up voting&quot;, we think of a voting ring, where one user continuously up votes another. This is negative for the targeted user. Well, here, we've got a voting ring with the site and this user. A user continuously up votes the site, causing negative damage for the site.  We mix good and bad content. Since low quality questions are a victim of the voting spree, many get meddled with the rest of &quot;good quality&quot; questions, despite being closed as off-topic, too broad, or whatever the reason. We can no longer reliably sort questions by quality with the very system that was designed to help us.   ... And the rest of voting fraud issues outlined in .  I've got a couple questions on this:  Is this comparable to serial voting? Should such votes be reversed? How should we determine whether or not to reverse them?  Should we stop this? Let it be? Is this really that big of a problem for sites? (I would argue that it's less of an issue for graduated sites that receive large amounts of content, but what about beta sites that rarely see more than a few questions a day)