On comments on Izabella Laba's blog, Ben Webster claimed that "[The reputation system] really is there to enable community moderation...not to judge people". If that's the case, why is it made so very prominent? After reading this, I took another look at the mathoverflow pages. It appears that almost every time a user's name is displayed, their reputation is also listed. (One exception is comments.) Why not reduce bandwidth and simultaneously reduce competitiveness by not displaying the reputation quite so often, at least by default?

Perhaps the thread was Kowalski on Mathoverflow .

I would personally prefer if a word less loaded than "reputation" were used. Even something whitebread like or "participation index" or "score" would make me a little more comfortable.

That's an interesting option, Anton. However, I wouldn't actually want to hide votecounts: those are really useful and much less problematic. In particular, vote counts are a judgement of the material, not of the person. I would turn on an option to hide just the reputation. (I would also argue that they should be on by default.)

@dthurston: I don't think that such an option should be on by default; knowing how familiar somebody is with MO is useful information when responding to them. Hiding votecounts came into it because people were curious about how much voting habits are influenced by visible scores. I think it shouldn't be hard to roll various options about what to hide into a single cookie, but I don't have time to do it right now. You can actually add custom css for MO yourself; see this post.

@Noah: That's a nice idea. I would add a chunk for <15 (really new, or heavily downvoted) and one for 2000-3000 (you can edit at 2k and vote to close at 3k). I think it would be best to replace the reputation span by a symbol rather than a string like "frequent user". Otherwise the letters run together with the name too easily. How about something like the progression ! ⋅ ∘ ⊡ ⊟ ⊞

<15    !
15-99  ⋅
100-2k ∘
2k-3k  ⊡
3k-10k ⊟
10k+   ⊞

[Edit: changed symbol for <15 from empty to "!" since a post by a <15 rep user is probably worth noting]

The problem with using symbols like that is that you have to explain to people what they mean.

I'm talking out my ass here. But what about something like showing just the most significant figure of the reputation? Or, say, the base-2 logarithm, rounded down to the nearest integer? It still gives the information of whether the person is someone who can be "trusted" without having a number that changes constantly.

@Michael: The idea is supposed to be that (with the exception of !) the weight of the symbol increases. I hoped this would be intuitive ... I also considered a progression like ⊦ ⊧ ⊩ ⊫. Providing the logarithmic reputation is effectively what is done visually by displaying the number, and what is done by using symbols of increasing weight. I think I'd be more interested in running experiments like displaying logarithmic reputation directly if I could actually collect data.

@dthurston: please do report back one way or the other! I'm curious to hear the results.

@dan: Either I wasn't clear enough in explaining how to "activate" this feature, or you're asking for something different. I'll assume the first, and you can correct me if it's the second.

You can replace reputations with symbols almost everywhere by going to the "prefs" tab on your user page and checking the box that says "Show symbols !, ⋅, ∘, ⊡, ⊟, ⊞ for reputations above 0, 15, 100, 2000, 3000, 10000, respectively."

I tried it briefly, but I prefer to see the numbers. If you try it out, please do report back with your thoughts.

This is great! Thanks, Anton.

btw, would there be a big uproar against it if this setting were turned on by default ....... ???

Regarding Kevin Lin's last post, which seems to be in line with the sentiment expressed by some others too: I have no strong feelings about this either way, but I do not understand what would be gained by this change; in some sense I think it could make the issue that it should solve or make less of an issue, a more severe issue. What I mean is this: at the moment there is the reputation number that is displayed this is to be replaced by some symbols to be displayed. Yet introducing these symbols would create exactly six (or a given small number) of classes of users. In this way, if one sees rep-points as creating some form of hierarchy of the users, the hierarchy would in my opinion be more visible, not less. Yes, more users would be in the same class, but the difference between somebody with say 1523 and 3154 points would IMHO be much more 'visible'. Moreover, at least for me, the actual frequently changing rep-number makes clearer that the number is to a considerable extent determined by the time one is active on the site as, exceptions aside, it is an increasing or at least non-decreasing function of the time one is around (of course with a different average rate of change per user). By contrast, the symbols rather suggest, exagerating a bit, that one has an assigned place in the user-hierarchy and only rarely one has the privilege of beeing promoted.

As said, if it is changed, I do not mind, I just wanted to add my point of view.

ADDED: Regarding David Speyer's question, as somebody who 'arrived' when there was already a lot on the site, I can say that I did look through the user-pages quite a bit to see who uses the site; which I admit is a bit ironic given that I myself am anonymous.

I find this discussion not very important. Some users have reputation simply based on their names, or where they work, or the mathematics they've done, or awards they've won, or scandals they've been apart of. To me it feels like having MO keep track of "reputation" and displaying it with the word reputation, is almost upsetting people's preferred world-view. And I think that's good. It's like having more than one time-piece, you're never sure exactly what time it is. So I'm fine with the status-quo. I think it adds a very pleasant confusion to the whole idea of reputation. And I think it's great, well, really cute that we have an undergrad with more reputation than all the fields medallists on the planet. Woohoo MO! Revolution!