Thread: Reputation frustration

Back in the day we used post count as a proxy for knowledge, and liked it. There was also this scheme where your status string (the thing just above "Join Date" on the left) was determined by how many posts you had. I believe it maxed out at 100 posts at which point your status became "Honemeister". Fortunately that's gone, since it was incredibly misleading to newbies.

More seriously, though, post count, thanks count, and reputation all suffer from some common failings that make them more decorative than useful.

They display their current value on every post, and not the value they had at the time of the post. This means you can have some post by a member with a 5-digit post count or 5-dot reputation that's incredibly wrong, but what you don't know is that it was his 5th post, and he was neither experienced nor knowledgable at the time.

There are also guys around there that know a lot about shaving technique or restoration or metallurgy but know very little about honing, but neither the post count nor reputation tell you which topics to ignore them on.

Also, many of the guys giving the thumbs up and reputation points are newbies that can't really evaluate the validity or usefulness of the poster. I suspect that this implies that these two numbers are closely correlated to the number of non-social posts made since these systems were enabled.

A more useful proxy might be something similar to the google pagerank scheme, so that the reputation of a member is related to how many links there are to his posts and how many references there are to his userid.