Timeline for answer to User activation: Learnings and opportunities by ColleenV
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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13 events
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| Sep 19, 2024 at 12:33 | comment | added | ColleenV | @VLAZ I am not saying that it isn't harder to get reputation (or that it is). I'm just saying that graph doesn't show it's harder to get reputation. There are tons of other causal factors that could explain that graph. I know there are lots of stories about how it's probably harder - I don't see the data. I see a lot of veteran users who are highly engaged with the site making inferences about the experience of new(er) unengaged users. | |
| Sep 19, 2024 at 12:28 | comment | added | VLAZ | @ColleenV What you described is just one aspect. There is also definitely less rep income even if you do put in the effort. Posts from, say, 2012 or 2014 or so tend to have vastly more votes on them than posts later on. And it's not really just time-based. A post from 2014 would have a lot of votes in 2018. But a post from 2020 would not tend to have the same amount of votes in 2024. The same time period for each. Nowadays, if you post something, you can generally expect votes from the first 24 hours. While it's relatively fresh. | |
| Sep 19, 2024 at 12:18 | history | edited | ColleenV | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 8 characters in body
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| Sep 19, 2024 at 12:14 | comment | added | ColleenV | @SPArcheon-onstrike I've tried to clarify what I mean by effort. If I don't care about reputation at all and all I do is ask questions and grab the first answer that seems like it helps me and move on until I have another question, statistically I'm going to have lower reputation than someone who visits the site regularly, improves their questions, interacts with the community, and is generally engaged. And I'm not disagreeing at all that the current reputation system has scaling problems. I just think that the focus on gamification in this context is wrong-headed. | |
| Sep 19, 2024 at 12:12 | history | edited | ColleenV | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Try to clarify what I mean by effort.
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| Sep 18, 2024 at 7:46 | comment | added | SPArcheon | building on what @VLAZ already said, the "effort to rep" relationship is totally skewed: not only luck plays a big role, the site you are on contributes too. If I compare my SciFi and SharePoint rep the numbers are almost the same, but the spent effort is far higher on SharePoint. Working hard to find answers to SharePoint problems and getting little to no recognition while an answer to a question about Asterix gets to HNQ and gives me 68 votes... only teaches me to avoid wasting my time on SharePoint. | |
| Sep 18, 2024 at 6:13 | comment | added | user1937198 | In addition to effort, the other consideration is capability. Earning reputation requires skills and knowledge. At a minimum it requires the ability to effectively communicate, and understand what is relevant to a problem. Answering requires a certain level of expertise. Those who joined the site's earlier in its history were likely biased to those with those skills, and now the site has got more popular, that bias has shifted. | |
| Sep 16, 2024 at 22:36 | comment | added | ColleenV | @DanMašek I agree with everything in your comment. I was talking about worth in the context of incentivizing someone to engage with the site. | |
| Sep 16, 2024 at 15:00 | comment | added | Dan Mašek | "Having 3000 reputation on SO now doesn’t mean nearly as much" -- functionally, you still get the same privileges. Beyond that, it's kinda meaningless anyway, hardly something you can make objective comparisons based on. And often, racing for the highest rep seems to be counterproductive for the site's goal -- e.g. people just repeatedly answering the same trivialities with many existing duplicates, because actually curating doesn't give you points. | |
| Sep 13, 2024 at 18:53 | comment | added | VLAZ | Also doesn't mean that rep is as easy or easier to come by. 75% of my posts (687/911) have total scores of zero (21.41%), one (33.37%), or two (20.64%). The posts I have with score 10 or more are 30, or 3.3% of the total amount of posts. My top two posts are one that hit the HNQ (it's #2) and #1 seems very popular but I've not found why. It's a post I spent 5 minutes writing. I remember because I wrote it while waiting for a 10 minute task to finish. It's so disproportionately upvoted, that of my top 10 posts, you have to sum together the scores of 2 through 9 to match it. A huuuuge outlier. | |
| Sep 13, 2024 at 17:57 | comment | added | ColleenV | @VLAZ I am not claiming that effort is directly correlated to reputation. I was just saying that you don't get reputation without trying (unless you're really lucky and your question hits the HNQ I guess). Declining reputation per user could involve a lot more factors than "All users want to get reputation, but it's harder than it used to be". I don't know about SO, but there are plenty of people on ELL that ask low quality questions until they stop getting new user pity answers, start a new account and keep going. They don't care about reputation or badges or building a library of knowledge. | |
| Sep 13, 2024 at 11:30 | comment | added | VLAZ | I don't think we can claim that effort=reputation. It's definitely not a linear relation. Sure, for zero effort you'd naturally get zero rep. But 1 unit of effort doesn't translate to a unit of rep. You could spend 100 effort for one answer and get little, if any, reputation to show for it. Or spend 5 effort on something that shows up in the HNQ and get 1000+ rep from that. The most direct "effort to rep" you can get to is to just answer everything that shows up. Then you'd get an upvote or two on every other post or so. | |
| Sep 13, 2024 at 10:37 | history | answered | ColleenV | CC BY-SA 4.0 |