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Some ideas to potentially make reputation more meaningful and productive
#1
To preface, I do not think this is a pressing issue that needs urgent attention, this is just me brainstorming. I don't care that much about internet points, but if we're going to have them then they might as well be productive.

Currently, reputation simply translates to how many posts you've made and how many people liked them. In most cases, it's used to circlejerk popular opinions and brigade unpopular ones, or it's simply given freely to every post from someone a user likes and taken from every post from someone a user dislikes. In my opinion, this not only means reputation has no constructive meaning or value, it also encourages herd mentality of people simply agreeing with the most popular voice without bothering to form their own opinion or engage in the conversation constructively. This is not necessarily a criticism of the community, but of the inherent effects of the current reputation system. My goal with these ideas and this discussion overall is to change reputation from a popularity score to a measure of a user's engagement with the community.

The following ideas are listed roughly from least to greatest in how impactful I think they would be as well as how difficult they might be to implement, though admittedly I don't know a ton about web development. While these may or may not work well in tandem with each other, they are for the most part presented individually and not necessarily intended to be implemented all at once.

A) Show reputation from the past month on users' posts as well as total reputation.
This information is already viewable on a user's profile, this suggestion is to simply make it more immediately visible. I feel that recent activity is more important than activity from months or years ago, though past reputation is still relevant, so I think both should be shown on posts to more easily gauge someone's involvement in the community when reading their post. Something like "Reputation: [recent reputation] ([total reputation])"

B) Make likes/dislikes on posts visible only to the poster (and forum staff).
This would prevent likes/dislikes from influencing the course of discussion, as users would not be able to see which opinion has the bigger score to agree with and would be more encouraged to form their own opinion and engage in the conversation more constructively. This could potentially be a timed effect, with the scores being shown after a day/few days/however long.

C) Limit reputation changes to 1 per user per thread.
What I mean by this is that each user can only affect each other user's reputation once per thread, based on the sum total of likes and dislikes from that individual user. For example, if 3 users each individually liked more posts than disliked from you in a thread, you would receive +3 reputation for that thread, instead of the total sum of likes from each post. This would better represent your overall engagement in the thread, rather than how many times you posted that people liked. This would likely require some form of reputation reset as it would change the proportions of scores, but hey, it's just internet points right?

Share your thoughts, opinions, takes, concerns, questions, ideas, and rep manipulations in the comments.
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Some ideas to potentially make reputation more meaningful and productive - by tiefling lesbian - 12-10-2022, 05:46 AM

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