Since the raison d'etre for the reputation score/gamification is to motivate people to produce good content for the site, and closed questions are by definition not considered good content for the site, wouldn't it be better if the reputation gains for the answers were reverted when a question is closed?

That way we can avoid the irony of it motivating people to contribute bad content instead, or to encourage others to post bad content by answering it. I'm talking about the so called "repwhoring".

To avoid hurting anyone's feelings, this could be done only if the question is closed within 24 hours of its being asked, and old questions that were asked before could be exempted, too.

Writing this in response to Question quality is dropping on Stack Overflow, Where are the non-trivial PHP-questions lately?, Are high-reputation users answering fewer questions?, Thwart publishing duplicate and low quality questions


Some people raised in the comments the legitimate concern that this would lead to high-rep users voting to reopen in bad faith.

I have no good answer to this, except maybe reputation counters for the answers (but not for the question) can be hidden, until the 24-hour period expires. People can still vote on answers, the OP can accept an answer, but it's not shown until 24 hours. If the question is closed meanwhile, people don't see how much they lost, so they don't get emotional.

Since reputation is still visible for questions, you can spot good questions to answer to.

Remember, the goal is only to prevent "repwhores" from attracting "help vampires", who then spam the site with their questions, and make it all noise and no signal.

Edit (2):

I less intrusive way to deal with the problem would be to delay only the inbox notifications for reputation changes, and also the person's repscore, so he can't notice when he has lost reputation due to the question being closed. The 24-hour period can also be reduced to 6 or even 3 hour period. This can only be done for users with 3000+ rep, who are the only ones who can vote to reopen anyway.

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    You are asking for another repocalypse. Bad idea. It is important to keep closing questions friction-free. – Hans Passant May 22 '14 at 15:22
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    I don't propose this to be applied retroactively. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 15:25
  • Then you are asking for a never-ending stream of mini-repocalypses. That still doesn't make it a good idea. Worse, actually. – Hans Passant May 22 '14 at 15:28
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    @HansPassant I also suggested that reputation counters are invisible (for answers, but not for the question) until a 24-hour grace period has passed. If the question gets closed after that, no reputation is lost. If it's closed before that, nobody sees how much they lost, or ever gets notified in their inbox. It's at the end of my question. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 15:35
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    As ChrisF articulates below, we already remove rep from answers that are deleted. I think this already strikes a good balance. – Robert Harvey May 22 '14 at 16:51

This suggestion, along with others I've seen recently, makes the assumption that if we all stopped answering trash questions they'd stop coming. While I understand the reasoning, I believe in reality this would have little impact on the rate of bad questions being asked.

People come to Stack Overflow to have their problems solved because of its ridiculously high Google ranking, and because they see good questions getting great answers. Very few of these people look at their own question or problem and think "gee, this really isn't the same quality as the rest of these questions." These people are desperate to find a solution or have someone do their work for them, and will not pay any attention to the overall quality of the site.

As a thought experiment, imagine we identified and deleted every single bad question on the site tonight. Would this even be noticed by the people asking us to do their work for them? No, it would not. You only need to ask the people over at Programmers how many bad SO questions they get from terrible askers. Even better, look at the old Meta.SO, where every single programming question asked there was promptly scrubbed from the site. Despite that, we still got dozens of bad programming questions each day due to the spillover from the Google rank of SO.

So while well-intentioned, I believe suggestions like this will not have any impact on the number of bad questions we get every day. In fact, some of these suggestions (and some recent behavior from folks attacking those answering bad questions) may harm the site by driving away experts who just want to help people out. I know I've provided answers that I'm proud of to poorly researched or asked questions, and I didn't care about the reputation points (which have long since become meaningless to me) but because I enjoyed a challenge and liked helping people.

The most effective ways to combat the bad questions we get will be to block or catch them early enough that they don't have a chance to be answered or to annoy experts and regular users. Making the question ban more effective will provide a significant reduction in these questions by itself, based on my recent observations. Most of the terrible questions (and sock puppet operators) I've come across lately were second to seventh accounts of previously question-banned users who have found ways to work around the system. This kind of abuse needs to be curtailed first.

Beyond that, the close votes queue has been shifted to deal with more recent questions first, and I can see that this has led to questions being closed faster. There are other ways we can make this more effective, and I believe that this is where we should focus our efforts first.

  • I hadn't thought about that. I kind of thought that StackOverflow's reputation for being a free help desk was being spread by word of mouth among lazy programmers circles. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 17:07
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    Removing/not answering bad questions doesn't stop bad questions form being asked, but it certainly helps a lot. While someone who has never asked a question on SO probably will ask a bad question regardless of whether we answer bad questions or not, when they find their bad questions going unanswered they'll either learn to fix them or learn to not ask them. When people learn that their terrible questions are answered, they learn to keep asking them. Now we have to deal with users like this one who are asking hundreds of bad questions. – Servy May 22 '14 at 18:40
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    @Servy - Getting answers to their questions might encourage an individual, but the question ban kicks in so early for truly terrible askers that I don't know they'd have enough time for this to make a difference. The case you linked to above is a different thing entirely, and that feeds back into why improving the question ban to catch multiple accounts better would be a significant improvement. Even there, I looked at the other accounts he hints at, and I don't think they're asking the kind of terrible questions that make up the worst of what we're seeing now. Most of them looked good. – Brad Larson May 22 '14 at 19:33
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    @BradLarson The question ban is also dependent on bad questions being closed and downvoted. When bad questions aren't closed and aren't downvoted then the question ban can't kick in. In general I simply see a large number of single users asking quite a lot of bad questions. Yes, the question ban is a useful tool, and it does help, but simply not answering the bad questions is more reliable, more effective, and much harder to subvert, if we can actually accomplish that. – Servy May 22 '14 at 19:38
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    @sashoalm: "...StackOverflow's reputation for being a free help desk was being spread by word of mouth among lazy programmers circles" But that would require effort. ;-) – T.J. Crowder Jul 15 '14 at 12:23
  • The question ban seems to have a loophole that may need to be addressed: meta.stackexchange.com/q/248388/217863 – apaul May 6 '15 at 18:29

No. However, we already remove reputation when a post is deleted (unless it's more than 60 days old and has a score of 3+).

A closed question can be re-opened, so if we removed the rep on closure we'd have to reapply it on reopening.

Truly bad questions should be closed quickly and deleted once they've been closed (after giving enough time for the question to be improved). There are tools and queries you can use to find such questions. If they're deleted quickly (i.e. less than 60 days after they were asked) then none of the participants will permanently gain reputation which should help discourage people from answering said questions.

It's much simpler to leave things as they are.

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    Yes it is simpler, but is it better? I don't see good questions anymore, and I see how the site is becoming the Mechanical Turk for debugging crappy code, the universal homework solver. I guess kicking the can down the road is simpler. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 13:23
  • @sashoalm, You can still vote on closed questions/answers. What would happen to the rep then? Would you not gain the upvotes you received while closed until the post is reopened? – gunr2171 May 22 '14 at 13:29
  • @gunr2171 Nothing - same as with community wiki questions - no rep is gained or lost on them, or their answers. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 13:31
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    @Chris Also, how many closed questions are reopened, really? I suspect they're as rare as hens teeth. I would have run a query on Stack Exchange Data Explorer if I knew how. 99% of the closed questions are simply bad, and once closed, will never be reopened. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 13:33
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    @sashoalm, So you're saying that I should not get any rep for my fantastic answer even though the question is closed? That does not sound fair. And I'll run some SEDE queries, because I'm interested in the numbers. – gunr2171 May 22 '14 at 13:34
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    @gunr2171 Yes, I'll be honest - I'm saying exactly that. There is no other way to discourage the help vampires. They want answers, they don't care about the site or its rep. And that is the problem with gamification - you say you want to gain rep even if you encourage the question quality to drop on the site. So you the rep system encourages you to want to answer bad questions, because they are easy. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 13:37
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    @sashoalm, I would much rather close questions faster than deny rep. Don't even let the community the chance to answer the question before it's closed. Also, there are 11,423 answers with >=3 for a closed question with <=-3. – gunr2171 May 22 '14 at 13:43
  • "if we removed the rep on closure we'd have to reapply it on reopening" - at the first sight I was going to comment about how much better this would be than current way, but upon thinking about this a bit more, I figured that this could raise a furious resistance against question closures. Consider editing the post to point to this possible (heck, simply inevitable) side effect of the proposed change – gnat May 22 '14 at 13:54
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    @gunr2171 I would prefer faster closure, too, but it's not happening - 5 people can't vote to close before someone has put an answer. And once a question is answered, it's game over - positive reinforcement is there, "come to stack overflow, get your buggy code fixed!" – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 13:57
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    @gnat The solution is easy - if a user is systematically voting to reopen a question in bad faith, the moderators can take action. People with that kind of points are not that many, so eventually you'll catch all who misbehave. See, you can't fight against the question askers because they are too many, most are first time posters, and they don't care about their account, just about getting an answer. It's a game of whack-a-mole that you can't win. "Repwhores", on the other hand are tied to their accounts - and their points, and they are much fewer people to control. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 14:07
  • @sashoalm that would work if there was a limited amount of users who'd "revolt". But, it isn't so, this would impact tens thousands users and no moderators could handle this. We've been through similar issue at a smaller scale (with deleted questions - MSE old-timers may recall "Black Saturday") and it ended with compromise, allowing to keep rep for some posts. Resistance would be terrible, trust me – gnat May 22 '14 at 14:15
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    Maybe users who have answered a question can't vote to reopen it? I.e. kind of like "conflict of interest". Or maybe require at least 1-2 votes from people who haven't answered it. – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 14:21
  • @sashoalm, I finished the query. While the %s are quite low, the surprising thing is that the lower your rep level, the higher chance for reopen. But at least we have some hard numbers. But even though the number of questions reopened is minuscule, it's still not a reason to deny people rep. – gunr2171 May 22 '14 at 14:29
  • @gunr2171 Is the totalCount column about total questions asked, or total questions closed? – sashoalm May 22 '14 at 14:36
  • It was all questions asked, but I've updated the query to be only (currently) closed questions. So now I'm going to eat my words. We should move this to chat if we are going to keep talking about queries. – gunr2171 May 22 '14 at 14:41

No, you shouldn't, because:

  1. If some users thought the question was good enough to up-vote (or down-vote*), then, well, let their opinions stand. The question will be closed all the same.
  2. This would not really help anything: I don't know that reputation-whoring via should-be-closed question is a significant phenomenon (correct me if I'm wrong). And it's not as if reputation is some kind of absolute truth we must have set to the "correct" value.
  3. Some people disagree with close votes, and these are often people who have voted for the question. A close decision is very often not clear-cut.

* This is actually a bit probelamtic if you consider down-voting. One could argue that users should enjoy 'grace' for an invalid question being closed, or counter-argue against that.

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