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Should posting on Meta affect reputation?
When we launched this community, we did not yet have the ability to set different reputation grants for different categories. We've had this for a while but we failed to follow up before now, sorry.
Do you want us to change posts on Meta to not award rep for upvotes or subtract it for downvotes? This change would be retroactive, though not immediately -- the next time a certain custodial script runs, reputation levels would be adjusted to remove rep gained from Meta.
Update 2023-11-23: This question has one highly-voted answer and no visible disagreement, so barring any objections in the next few days, we'll plan to remove meta rep sometime next week. I'll update here when we do, or if a reason arises not to.
1 answer
Codidact has already managed somewhat to separate domain knowledge from moderator suitability. So far so good, but reputation is also a measurement of activity.
It might make sense that being active on meta should be rewarded somehow, just as being active on the main site is rewarded over time.
Still I don't think meta discussions should yield reputation, because I believe everyone should feel free to voice their opinions and arguments even if they suspect that those are unpopular. Metas have a tendency of "band wagon" behavior, where everyone votes on some post just because it has already been voted on - in either direction.
I believe we have - consciously or not - inherited the mindset from SE that votes on meta are used to express agreement/disagreement. If we don't want votes to mean that but something else (reward/trust etc), then maybe a separate "poll" feature is necessary, because it is necessary to have some sort of means to establish community consensus.
Similarly, we use the metas for support requests, bug reports and similar. There is really no reason to vote on these in either direction.
So I think we should do as SE and make it so that meta votes does not add/remove user reputation.
Perhaps we could instead look at the moderator privilege unlocking criteria and instead reward activity on meta by unlocking certain privileges?
As for what to do with reputation already earned from meta, I don't know, but perhaps that's a separate topic.
Also, I believe the same arguments above are applicable to pretty much all the sites except https://meta.codidact.com where it doesn't really matter.
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