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There was a massive thread of comments after the announcement of the changes to the points awarded for Questions.

I am not sure if I spotted anyone from UXSE providing their thoughts there, but was wondering what people thought of the changes?

I personally ask a lot of questions (both in wanting to know if other people have thoughts on the same issue and also to push the boundaries of my knowledge) and have benefited from this change substantially, but I was wondering whether it is going to lead to the outcomes that the company wants to achieve.

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My thought is that Jeff's original rational behind the original change years ago (see Should the weight of question upvotes be reduced?) was solid... literally anybody can ask a question, whereas it requires some skill and/or experience to answer one. Therefore the reward should be greater.

Ergo, I, for one, am not a fan of the recent change.

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    I kind of think that anybody can also answer a question, and that it also requires some skill and/or experience to ask a good question. If you look at the user rankings, you'll see that most of the people at the top get their points from answering questions, which suggests that it is easier to score points from answers rather than questions, and generally the harder thing to do requires more effort/skill. The fact that we have allowed more points for answers may have led to more people focusing on that, and thus asking good questions much harder. What do you think?
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Nov 19, 2019 at 22:27
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    I can see where you are coming from, and from that direction it seems like a "6 of one and half a dozen of the other" type thing... if that makes sense (which admittedly, I'm not articulating well). To give a more concrete example, on 3DPrinting, I have asked a lot of questions as I was a beginner and didn't know much, but needed to learn. Because of that my rep was less than the more experienced users. However, as they did know more than I did then that rep differential seemed justified, and I really didn't mind. However, now my rep has jumped, and it makes me seem more knowledgable than I am
    – Greenonline
    Nov 19, 2019 at 22:33
  • I do agree with what you are saying for sure. I guess personally I have always continually tried to ask questions throughout my career (and the type of questions have definitely also changed). I suppose the thinking of whether questions are as important as answers is not universally agreed (but certainly one can't exist without the other). You could argue that there are people of different reputation points answering questions as well, so I find it hard to continue in a path where questions and answers have different values.
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Nov 20, 2019 at 3:10
  • By the way, you have a very solid rep on all the StackExchange sites that you participate in - something I don't see very often!
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Nov 20, 2019 at 3:11
  • Thanks, but it's probably because (I think) I have waaay too much time on my hands... Mind you the news these days is so dull, that the edutainment of SE makes a much better read... :-)
    – Greenonline
    Nov 20, 2019 at 8:42
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Two thoughts:

  1. I think retrospectively giving out points to everyone isn't that great. It feels like the typical inflation problem; by giving everyone more points you're simply reducing the value of them for everyone.

  2. Someone in the comments made a very good point about how the greatest questions are typically refined into that state by later editors, not the original OP:

    Typically, such refinements are done by the editors (who are unrewarded for their efforts), not the original question asker.
    Most popular questions have titles that were carefully and extensively SEO’d by editors. (The OPs tend to be new accounts that are not very good at asking questions.)

    For that reason I'd actually be in favor of rewarding editors as well (not an easy task). Perhaps weighting the percentage of added content and giving a portion of points to that editor? E.g.: User X added 80% to User A's question, on upvote A gets 10p and X gets 8p.

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I wonder if answers should have a non-linear reward system. E.g. An answers first upvote gets 5 points. It's 2nd gets 10 points, it's third gets 12 points, This would reward people who take the time to write a good general answer.

I also wonder if questions should get a non-linear response. A question gets NO points until it gets an answer, then gets some number of points for each answer it catalyzes. This would hit me hard: I ask lots of questions that don't get answers.

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  • +1 This is an interesting idea, but I think it might end up with some of the questions/answers getting a disproportionate amount of points. Perhaps if it was something like first 5-10 upvotes gets 5 points, 10-20 gets 10 points and the rest gets 5 points? I like answers tough questions, so I might have to see if I can try and answer some of your questions :)
    – Michael Lai Mod
    Dec 7, 2019 at 1:28

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