I personally have been a bit turned off by what (in my view) seems like excessive bureaucracy.
I think that the people that set up MO have been fantastic in being so open in their decision-making and in continually explaining and justifying what they do, and in listening to the opinions of anyone and everyone.
The discussions that have been taking place on meta would have taken place anyway, but it would have been via email or via bumping into people in corridors. It may seem like excessive bureaucracy, but I think that that is an impression created by the fact that (most of) it has been conducted out in the open where anyone can have a say and be heard. I commend Anton and Scott (and the others) on setting up meta in the first place to keep this discussion off MO whilst allowing it to take place in an easy-to-reach public place. That, to me, seems like the best of both worlds: those who hate these discussions can just get on with the maths, whilst those who like to discuss how to make it run better can sound off here to their heart's content.
Maybe we should be more strict in shifting putative discussions here from MO to further remove any sign of "bureaucracy" from MO itself. That's certainly a valid point.
I can just imagine that someone might come to MathOverflow and notice examples of such discussion (in the comments, or god-forbid if they went into meta!) and be given a bad vibe that this place is run by random young people on the Internet with lots of reputation who have very different opinions than their own and who have no idea that they are a "serious guy" in real life.
I'm not sure whether the person who is the "serious guy" is the person encountering MO for the first time or the "random young people" who run MO. Either way, who's now worrying about reputation?!
If it takes "random young people" to move mathematics into the internet age, I'll start funding probability theory to try to generate more of them. Things like MO and the nLab are experiments to see if we can use this shiny new toy that everyone keeps shouting about to our advantage. Some may work, some may not (blogs spring to mind there), some may work brilliantly from the start, some may need a little tweaking. But these things are genuine innovations, far more than just shifting from print journals to electronic journals! The nLab is maths being done in the open right from the first ideas to the final theorems - that's new. MO is mathematicians interacting from all over the world via questions-and-answers - that's new. Both are great, IMHO, but very different. Some find the pace of MO a little off-putting and prefer the nLab. Others find the nLab a little confusing (read Ben Websters SBS post from a few months back, but then note that Ben now has his own "web" at the nLab), but find MO very exciting.
So someone being put off from MO because they aren't shown the "proper respect" due to them from the IRL status ... not sure I can sympathise very much with that. I certainly don't see that as worth getting rid of the value of reputation. As I tried to say, reputation is extremely useful for me. Not as a game, but as a tool. I do not want to see it removed from the main list of questions, from a question post itself, or from answers. I do not want to have to trawl through pages to look up someone's reputation. As I said earlier, I use reputation as a guide to how much time I should assign to someone's posts. Losing that would mean that MO was no longer easy to use and would quickly become tiresome and tedious. I'm quite happy for the font to be so that it isn't so prominent (my eyesight is still okay), and the badges really are just a bit of fun (something that was driven home by the fact that I recently got "Nice Question" (a silver badge!) for the "Walking in the Rain" question!) so I'm happy to lose them, but reputation is what makes MO more than just a random list of questions and answers and so I really do not want to lose it.
]]>I couldn't come up with anything better than the adjective 'childish' (with quotes). I apologize in advance if this becomes the new 'competitive' (which I sadly also introduced). I'm open to better terminology.
]]>I think your last post summarizes my feelings and position well. Francois' (fgdorais) adjective "childish" is not too far off, but perhaps emphasizes that aspect a little more strongly than I would want to. I'm glad that we're having this discussion. Although it's probably going to be inconclusive, I think that it's important. I'm glad that you're keeping an open mind, and I'll certainly try to do so as well.
]]>The fact that users with very good questions can get reputation points quicker than users with very good answers encourages that.
Actually, this doesn't really seem to be the case on MO. I regularly see answers with 20-30 votes, but I rarely see questions with that many votes that aren't community wiki.
]]>Maybe that's the real problem. It seems so "wild" on first encounter. Who's in charge? Who's to stop some ignorant oik from saying that what I wrote is "worthless". Don't they know that I'm a Big Person IRL?
Perhaps our esteemed moderators should be more prominent. Perhaps we're still not out of the "early stage" where the moderators need to protect their vision of what MO should be.
I've started picking up on this too. It looks like the lack of a sense of security is the big issue that gives bad PR to MO. I agree with Andrew and urge people to exercise restraint in using the term 'competitiveness' since it obscures the real causes of MO's bad PR. (All evidence of competitiveness I've seen comes from the general mathematical community, not specifically MO.)
Upon rereading his comments, it appears to me that Matt is really objecting to the 'childish' aspects of MO, that he wants MO to become more professional. This sounds reasonable, but I disagree. MO is not supposed to be a microcosm of the greater mathematical community. It is important to me that MO users of all levels, from first-year grad students to Fields medalists, have an equal standing in the MO community. The fact that users with very good questions can get reputation points quicker than users with very good answers encourages that. This is yet another good side effect of the reputation system.
]]>I have to confess that the longer this discussion goes on, the more confused I get as to what the phrase "competitiveness" is referring to.
I agree. This was a point I made above.
Perhaps it's just the parent in me, but when someone says something like "I don't like MO because it's too competitive." then I wonder if the word "competitive" is just being used as a one-word summary of a much more complicated experience, and that by focussing on that word and assuming that it means what I think it means, I'm missing out on the real problem.
According to Scott, Emerton, and andyputman, the word "competitive" has degenerated to simply meaning "bad". This is misleading for a number of reasons. First of all, competitive behavior is not categorically a bad thing, as Anton noted. Second, it makes it harder to make progress and combat the actual causes. If the problem is behavior that the community thinks is bad, calling it "competitiveness" and trying to come up with solutions to that problem are missing the point. If the problem is some other sort of negative behavior, we should call it what it is and try to find relevant solutions.
@Everyone:
If the problem is actual competitiveness, then, like Andrew, I would like to see evidence of competitive behavior. However, the current examples leave me unconvinced.
Also, as an allegedly competitive person, I can say that I have not cared about gaining reputation since I hit three thousand points and that I was motivated exclusively by the promise of gaining the ability to vote to close. Certainly doing something about these sorts of incentives would be more effective than decreasing the visibility of reputation score.
]]>So, please, even if examples aren't proof, they still help clarify the discussion!
Maybe I've just been around MO long enough that I've "internalised" the ways of avoiding the "competitive" aspects of MO and no longer realise that I'm doing it, or maybe I've stopped spending quite so much time on MO that I just don't see this behaviour going on, because, frankly, I have no idea what the rest of you are talking about. I thought I did, but after this long then I'm pretty sure that I don't.
I think that it is slightly ironic that some of those arguing for downplaying of reputation on MO confess to using reputation on MathSciNet instead! At least on MO, I can see my own reputation, I can find out why I have the reputation that I have (as can others), and I can do something about it if I don't like it! On MathSciNet, I have very little opportunity to alter that "reputation", or (since it is not really explicit) to ensure that it is interpreted in a fair manner.
Let me emphasise this: your reputation on MO is your reward for doing things that the "community" thinks are worth-while. Isn't that a good thing? To encourage good behaviour?
Of course, as it's a number and is fairly automatic, one can try to "game" the system, but we do have moderators who can deal with such. The system is set up so that for the most part it runs automatically, but they are there.
Maybe that's the real problem. It seems so "wild" on first encounter. Who's in charge? Who's to stop some ignorant oik from saying that what I wrote is "worthless". Don't they know that I'm a Big Person IRL?
Perhaps our esteemed moderators should be more prominent. Perhaps we're still not out of the "early stage" where the moderators need to protect their vision of what MO should be.
(PS. @Pete (about 7 years ago): Mea culpa. I apologise and will take more care next time.)
]]>Your milage might vary...
]]>In several occasions I have seen a remark on a selected answer saying something like: "Why was this answer selected? This is clearly not a full answer to your question!" To be clear, I am not talking about cases where the comment was intended to point out that a wrong answer was selected.
Whenever I see that a user answered a question and then left such a comment on the selected answer of another user, I interpret it (perhaps by mistake) as "hey, my answer was better, why did you prefer his over mine?" It also seems to me as disrespectful to the OP's choice to select a certain answer.
I think that such behavior should be discouraged, and I was wondering what do others think about this issue.
[Please note that the particular comments that I have in mind were not left by any of the participants of this discussion. Indeed, I would not make the above remark had I thought that it may be perceived as a personal accusation. So, if anyone in this discussion did leave such a comment, please don't take this personally.]
]]>@Emerton: I can see where you're coming from, and I certainly am not claiming to know all the answers. I'm still figuring out what my opinions are on the topic, but I think it is a perfectly reasonable position to say that not everyone needs to be involved in everything. In the interest of pushing the discussion forward, I'd really somebody in the "downplay reputation camp" to comment on my analogy between non-competitiveness and discussions. Is downplaying the game-like aspect of MO not neutralizing one of its major strengths (as fgdorais suggested)? Should we not be willing to appeal to a smaller audience in exchange for really doing a good job at the thing we do?
]]>I prefer the new font for reputation to the old; thanks for making the change.
As for the more general issue of the MO environment, my view is the following: in mathematics there are many hard questions, and a shortage of people who can answer them. We need as many people as we can, with as many different view-points and styles of working as possible.
To this end, the mathematical community should be open to as many different personality types and working styles as possible.
Now MO is not the whole mathematical community, but it is a part of it, and so I am applying the same principles to it. (These are the same principles I would try to apply to a department, to a class, to a fellowship program, ... .) I don't really agree with arguments of the "get over it" type. They apply to private gatherings, but I don't think that they should be applied to something as broad as MO. For better or worse, it is not a private gathering of a few mathematicians; it is more extensive than that. It may already be being funded by external granting agencies (I'm not sure about this), and if not already, surely will be in the future. It may well become a permanent feature of the pure mathematical landscape. For these reason, I think that it's worthwhile to analyze the environment on MO, and to try to optimize it to be as open as possible.
]]>When taken to extremes, these behaviors can be harmful, but I think the level on MO is not nearly as extreme as this thread has inflated it to be.
Amen.
To that end, I've overwritten the default css to decrease the weight of the font. What do you think?
I think it looked better the old way. In fact, the new font stands out more than the old one because it doesn't match the rest of the fonts on the page.
]]>Secondly, and more importantly, I don't see what real benefit would come from hiding or downplaying badges or reputation. If there were no badges and reputation were completely hidden (or didn't even exist), the site would be a lot less active and less fun, but it would still be competitive (equally competitive I think). Any site whose point is largely to post really good questions and really good answers is going to play to peoples' competitive instincts, especially if those posts get voted on. I find it hard to believe that anybody who objects to MO because it's too competitive would find it any more palatable if reputations were only displayed on user pages. If the world is divided into competitive people and non-competitive people, I don't think MO can reasonably try to target both of them.
However, I don't think the world is divided that way. After all, if people who objected to MO being too focused on reputation are clearly themselves too focused on reputation, because MO has lots of awesome content and it seems to me like the users are generally very nice to each other. I think it's a good thing to be in a competition with yourself when you compose a post (i.e. it's good that people try to get as many votes as possible, so long as they're trying to do it by making the post as good as possible or by responding to somebody's question very quickly). I also think it's a good thing to be in competition with others a bit: it makes it way easier to get better. When taken to extremes, these behaviors can be harmful, but I think the level on MO is not nearly as extreme as this thread has inflated it to be. For the most part, I think there are two good options for people who find MO too competitive:
†Okay, I realize my examples aren't quite perfect. Authors' names on the arXiv, for example, don't always display with the number of articles next to them, and people don't wear t-shirts prominently displaying how many shots of tequila they can stomach (though official titles are purely for display). I've already argued that I think displaying reputations next to usernames is actually useful, so I'd really need to be convinced to remove them, but I can see the argument that they are displayed too prominently. To that end, I've overwritten the default css to decrease the weight of the font. What do you think?
]]>Edit: For a correct answer, see below!
]]>On the other hand, over time I learned a few tricks and behaviors to keep the unpleasant sides of MO from affecting me. It took a while and it was frustrating from time to time. I think making it slightly easier to hide or circumvent whatever users find unpleasant would already do a lot, without jeopardizing the successful features of MO.
]]>My opinion is that there are probably plenty of mature mathematicians out there who might regard all the talk of reputation as somewhat puerile. I think it would be great if mathematicians of all persuasions were given the impression that MathOverflow is a professional place for "real" mathematicians to interact, rather than some new-fangled web 2.0 thing dominated by younger mathematicians and grad students. The use of the internet brings with it some great potential but also a few annoyances (just look at how much time users of MathOverflow have spent discussing and arguing in meta!) and I think that some professional mathematicians may be turned off by some things that might seem quite natural to us younger guys (or maybe more accurately, annoyances that us younger guys are more used to dealing with---e.g. internet arguments).
Very well said. It wouldn't surprise me if the term "reputation" struck people as somewhat tasteless. Perhaps we could just replace the word?
]]>I probably support every suggestion that makes reputation less visible.
There's been a discussion about whether there's evidence of potential contributors being put off by competitive behaviour. I know of one specific person, a full-time working mathematician, for whom that's been the case. Clearly it wouldn't be reasonable to say who.
I share other people's gut feeling that there are probably many mathematicians who won't like the competitive aspects of the site. In fact, I don't like the competitive aspects of the site. I don't like it when I feel the urge to be the first to put up an answer, when I'm racing to get there first. I'd be a better person if I didn't have that urge. To some extent that's just human frailty, and to some extent it's to do with the reputation system. That's why I support suggestions to make it a less prominent part of the site.
]]>Your suggestion makes sense (as does your objection one post further up!); in fact, I like it a lot. (As someone who likes to look at various contributors' recent activity, it would serve as a useful, if imperfect, guide to that.)
]]>I stridently oppose your proposal to alphabetize by last name. Haven't those of us at the end of the alphabet been punished enough?
]]>Regarding the point of the user page:
I often use the user page as an interface to make my way to a particular user's page, so that I can look at their latest activity. Now that I know the names of the people I follow, I can normally find them just via a search. But there was a time when I used to look for people manually via the list of users, and an alphabetical order, while not perfect, would have been more helpful than a reputation ranked (and hence highly non-constant!) order.
But even now, when I go to the user page in order to search for a particular user, I think it would look less like a contest if the display was alphabetized rather than ranked by reputation. (Yes, this is a remark that is entirely about superficial appearances, but hopefully this is in the spirit of the discussion!)
]]>1) is already implemented, but I like 2) and 3). However, I feel like this still will not be sufficient to filter out enough people. It's been noted before that somewhere near half of the people who have the fanatic badge (visited the site for 100 days straight) have extremely low reputations because they lurk instead of posting.
Edit: If the reputation cap is somewhere around 500 as Noah noted, then this should be enough, though.
]]>If there is problematic behavior that one wants to address, then one should be precise with one's labeling, since imprecision has the effect of doing nothing more than damage the user in question's reputation even further.
In any case, if this is the behavior that you would like to address, then it is not relevant to this discussion because the ways that one would deal with competitiveness are not the same ways one would deal with the behavior you describe.
]]>I would also support removing reputation scores from people's names on questions and answers, but I suspect we may be in a minority! (My impression was that Andrew's comment, which fpqc refers to, expressed a majority view.)
]]>In this discussion, as far as I understand it, "competitive" is standing in for a collection of related behaviours. As I wrote in a previous comment, there is a well-known style of mathematical discourse in which people try to demonstrate their technical knowledge in the brashest way possible, in order to impress, intimidate, or for other reasons. This behaviour may not be, strictly speaking, competitive, but it is certainly part of what I, and I suspect others (including Qiaochu) have been talking about in this thread.
I certainly don't think it is dominant on the site in any way, but my feeling is that even a small amount of such behaviour is very bad for the site. One hope would be that, by making the environment of the site less competitive, even in very superficial, cosmetic ways, such behaviour would be made even more rare than it currently is (by some osmotic effect, I guess; my hope is that it would simply it would be seen as evidently inappropriate by participants on the site).
]]>Edit: To clarify, it makes the moderation of the site much easier if we can see the questioner's reputation. For instance, telling whether or not a question is homework is made much easier if you can see someone's reputation.
]]>Another suggestion, which I would guess is controversial, would be to reorganize the User display to be alphabetical (say), rather than ranked by reputation. (I have in mind a typical alphabetized list, where as well as having links to the pages, you have links for each letter.) I am curious to hear if anyone besides me would support such a change. (I also have no idea if it's possible, given the constraints of the underlying software.)
Let me make an argument for these kinds of changes (to a large extent a rehash of what's already been said): I don't think they substantially effect the working of the site; I think they help improve the sense of the site as one for professional mathematicians to participate in, with the sillier aspects such as reputation and badges being downplayed; and they help make the site more neutral --- those who want to focus on reputation, badges, etc. of course still can, but those who are put of by these things won't see them as the dominant aspect of the site. Rather, they'll just see a site with a bunch of mathematicians asking and answering questions; people will have a reputation, but it will look more like what it is (in my understanding) supposed to be --- a merely technical measure of their level of involvement with the site.
In summary, these seem like minor changes that could make some kind of positive difference (although I appreciate that others may think that they are not minor changes, and/or that they will make little difference).
]]>@Ben:
The majority of the incentive for users to engage in competitive behavior comes from the incentive system for reputation! Changing the visibility of reputation is pointless unless you have some idea for reforming the incentive system....
Your suggestions are pretty reasonable (though I would want to hear from more people before supporting them), and probably implementable, but Anton is the one who knows that.
]]>Now a possible action, maybe at some point in the future: On the right side of the front page recently awarded badges are displayed. It seemed like a thing of not much consequence to me. Perhaps that space could be used for something else, once someone has ideas. For the moment I can't think of anything; but hopefully something will come up in the future.
Also display of badges could be removed from questions and answers as well.
]]>If you'd like to make such statements, I insist that you provide evidence. Just because people have not agreed with my conduct in the past does not mean that every negative possible statement about my posts is true.
Also, it's really not polite to make such statements then disappear without letting the other person answer. If you didn't want to "go down the rabbit hole", you shouldn't have attacked me.
]]>Examples are different from proof. Most of us aren't looking a peer-reviewed study, just actual examples of this happening. Not many have been forthcoming.
Everyone-
As far as I can tell this thread is degenerating into mostly consisting of tangents and the same people saying the same things multiple times. It's clear at this point that different people have different perceptions of the situation, which is probably just not going to change. Can we perhaps move toward actual suggestions for action (probably small action, but often small action can make a difference. Some people, at least, seemed to think that removing the reputations from the front page was a positive move).
]]>As I think you know, many of the examples of "extreme competitiveness" on MO can be traced to you. I don't want to rehash all the arguments on meta about this that have gone before, and thankfully much of the offending material has been deleted.
This is not true. Whatever you want to say about the problems I've had, competitiveness has not been a problem.
]]>Edit: And I've just noticed that you've tried to argue the same way, with your "I'm sure..." statement. This is a website for mathematicians, so I don't understand why you find it so hard to believe that we'd like some rigour in an argument about site policy.
]]>Although this is a common perception of MO, the community is not excessively competitive in general.
My impression was that no consensus was reached on whether this perception is true or not. For one, I agreed with it.
]]>[Aside: Why did my "4." get changed to "1."? That's a rather silly feature...]
It's a markdown feature that when markdown recognizes something as a numbered list, it does the numbering, ignoring the actual numbers that you wrote.
]]>[Aside: Why did my "4." get changed to "1."? That's a rather silly feature...]
]]>There is evidence that MO is unattractive (or even repulsive) to a potentially large population of mathematicians.
Although this is a common perception of MO, the community is not excessively competitive in general.
There is some desire to be attractive to a larger population base if doing so consists only of minor cosmetic changes.
Points 1 and 2 are well established by now, there has been little discussion of 3 but the reaction to Anton's minor changes to the front page has been positive. I think 3 is worth discussing more and I would add another point of discussion.
[@Mark, it clearly wasn't your fault. I don't think I would have gotten the point of what I wrote if I hadn't written it. I blame Romain Gary :) ]
]]>MathSciNet is my "search of last resort". Stuff there is old! Pete lays the foundation of my argument when he says it's a "snapshot of 2 years ago". Except that it's worse than that, some papers take two years, some take longer, some take shorter, it's fairly random. When I do find an article I like the look of, it's generally not available or only via some convoluted set-up that generally makes it not worth the bother. If someone really wants to make it possible for me to use their work, they should make it freely available. If they choose to lock it up, I'll look for some other way to find the information.
I didn't mean it to be a "MathSciNet vs arXiv" debate; I was surprised that someone would use MathSciNet as a way of finding out about people's interests and reacted to it. I don't search either to find out about a person. I'll look for the author's webpage and that's about as far as I'll go. If you look at what I actually said, you'll see that I didn't claim the arXiv to be a better place to judge someone's reputation.
(As for Andy's point about MathSciNet vs arXiv version, all I can say is "huh? Which papers have you been looking at?".)
But back on track. I would want to see real hard evidence that MO is "too competitive" before trying to make substantive efforts to remove the reputation element of it because I think that reputation is extremely useful for the reasons I tried to give above.
]]>