[philh]

He cares about incentivizing people to ask great questions, and some people see reputation as an incentive. Therefore he cares about reputation.

edit: to clarify, I mean he cares about how reputation is handled, not necessarily about his own reputation.

[melling]

If I cared most about reputation, I wouldn't have been asking questions in the Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp groups, for example. As you can see, you don't necessarily get a lot of points for asking or answering questions in an esoteric section.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264267/generating-a-quiz...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2264286/generating-a-quiz...

I had around 90 questions when I quit. The way the game was set up, you always got a lot more points for answering questions, then getting them upvoted. In general, you are going to get more votes in the most popular topics.

Reputation is also a currency. You can spend it to get better answers to your questions, 50 points minimum. My reputation was probably between 2300-2500 before the devaluation. I guess I would have lost half? Not sure. At any rate, where StackOverFlow could have been really interesting is moving beyond the simple questions and solving specific, but a more complicated, questions. If you don't take the time to be specific, someone will just give you a link to another site. That gets upvoted a few times and your question is done.

Hopefully, someone will come up with a better model. I'd do it without rep, but I like the economy aspect. I think it draws in people. People will game it, so design the model to get the desired results: Great questions and great answers.