I don’t understand the disagreement with splitting the reputation. For example, a really trivially easy way to do it would be like this: On every post, have a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote button that is specific just to that post, and then have a separate thumbs-up/thumbs-down button that appears next to the name of the user who made the post.
If you just dislike that particular post because it is off-topic, but you think the poster had the intention that it was on-topic (you just dispute that they were correct in their intention), then just downvote the question and not the user. Then the user voting is a signal of an individual’s favor in the community and the post voting is a signal of the community’s preferences for topical content.
I’m not advocating that we go through the trouble of doing it that way, but it would be an easy way to decouple the second order effect by which a user can feel personally discouraged if a post he or she thought was relevant and interesting is not seen that way by others. Their reputation as a contributing member may remain unchanged; but that particular post is signaled as uninteresting/noisy.
I would like a FAQ that functions much the way the guidelines function at the Stack Exchange websites. Without any guidelines, downvotes are chaotic and lose meaning. If a typical user doesn’t like a post, but the reason for dislike is not covered by the FAQ, they can still write a comment, or make a post in one of the Stack Exchange meta sites (to argue constructively for getting their preference category into the FAQ/guidelines). These signal the information and successfully decouple it from what the community says it wants in the FAQ.
I don’t understand the disagreement with splitting the reputation. For example, a really trivially easy way to do it would be like this: On every post, have a thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote button that is specific just to that post, and then have a separate thumbs-up/thumbs-down button that appears next to the name of the user who made the post.
If you just dislike that particular post because it is off-topic, but you think the poster had the intention that it was on-topic (you just dispute that they were correct in their intention), then just downvote the question and not the user. Then the user voting is a signal of an individual’s favor in the community and the post voting is a signal of the community’s preferences for topical content.
I’m not advocating that we go through the trouble of doing it that way, but it would be an easy way to decouple the second order effect by which a user can feel personally discouraged if a post he or she thought was relevant and interesting is not seen that way by others. Their reputation as a contributing member may remain unchanged; but that particular post is signaled as uninteresting/noisy.
I would like a FAQ that functions much the way the guidelines function at the Stack Exchange websites. Without any guidelines, downvotes are chaotic and lose meaning. If a typical user doesn’t like a post, but the reason for dislike is not covered by the FAQ, they can still write a comment, or make a post in one of the Stack Exchange meta sites (to argue constructively for getting their preference category into the FAQ/guidelines). These signal the information and successfully decouple it from what the community says it wants in the FAQ.
Re: separating post-reputation from user-reputation...
(blink)
You’re right; I’m wrong.
Re: FAQ...
Ah, I see… documenting the most-likely-default but not treating it as an expectation.
Hm.
Yeah, I can see where that could work.