Inflation and StackOverflow.com

(v0.1)

I really enjoy asking and answering questions on the StackOverflow.com, which has some exciting features. For example, it is mainly managed by the community, not the admin. So users on StackOverflow.com not only contributes information (Web 2.0), but also contributes "computation" (Web 3.0?). Another feature is the scoring system. A user can get scores based on votes of questions and answers she posts. This is a quite good incentive for users to offer there knowledge, because the score reflects one's progress and ability, and can be used in job interview. This second feature separates StackOverflow.com from traditional mail list based Q & A.


However, this reward mechanism also comes with an issue which I call it the disadvantage of late members. That is, it is more difficult for a late member to get the same amount of score than an early member. This is mainly because early questions are in general more important yet easier to answer than late questions. For example, user X asks how to sort a dictionary in Python. User Y easily answers this question. Since this question is quite common for new Python users, we can expect that many user will find this answer and give it a vote up. Y thus earns high score simply through a simple answer. Now after one year, Z enters StackOverflow.com. Z is much more knowledgeable in Python than Y, however, there are not such easy and rewarding questions for Z now. So Z's score might never go beyond Y's.

This issue could hurt the participation of such sites. New comers could lack strong incentive to make contributions, because they can hardly find questions to answer, and they cannot catch up with the early members anyway.

We can think about how to address this issue. I propose two simple ideas here. The first idea is to reduce the score of early members overtime. However, reducing one's "possession" sounds bad and might hurt the early members. A slightly different idea is to introduce inflation. That is, the Q & A site should increase the score for a vote up overtime, thus giving more scores to new members. Maybe the inflation in economy also serves similar purpose. After early some early people have accumulated a large amount of wealth, it would be hard for late people to catch up, because the rich people can have better return simply through safe investments such as government bond. Inflation, in some degree, could alleviate this issue.

Actually, the solution used by StackOverflow.com now is to have a recent ranking (e.g. in past year) together with overall ranking. The recent ranking would be a fairer play ground for everybody. However, the recent ranking is not as stable as the overall ranking, so I think the inflation idea still make sense. Of course, StackOverflow.com can complement the recent ranking with permanent badges (e.g. Top 1 in one month badge).

A related article：

Why I no longer contribute to Stackoverflow
http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow/