I won’t be pointing fingers today, no need to. This pseudo exploration of mine is, among other things, an attempt to organize some thoughts on the matter. I seem to believe that we’ve reached an unspoken consensus of sorts, and I’m curious to get some feedback on this issue.

In the days of the legacy chain, there was a lot of weight to our reputation score. It was somewhat implied that someone with a high number was valued by the community—as we know, this is hardly the case at the moment, and the spell may have been completely broken in the Haejin wars (at least for me).

Calling the reputation number useless would not be accurate, though, since it does give us some information regarding participation at least—hardly anything more than that.

Those of us who’ve been around long enough might remember @steem-ua, an attempt to come up with the "real" value of a user and assign it a supportive economic lifeline of a kind. However, that project was short-lived—its death marking an important step in the growth of our community.

I should say, in case there’s any confusion here, my critique of the current system, the almost useless reputation number—since it doesn’t give us insight into the value of said user—is not me calling for equal outcomes. It’s an invitation to think about how we could come up with a better way to display value in our ecosystem.

There are people here with high reputation who’ve been toiling away at their blogs for almost eight years that give almost nothing back to the community. They have most of their Hive-Power delegated and focus only on getting their daily ration, daily treat if you will—autovoting makes this a sad reality.

A new user might find one of these high-reputation individuals and get confused about the whole thing. Here’s a guy or gal, for that matter, who is giving a new user the precise wrong idea of "how to make it" here.

The lie:

Just write an article about something. Maybe about how coconut oil is good for the skin—watch the upvotes roll in.

The truth:

The content is irrelevant, as long as you’ve reached an upvote-for-upvote agreement with others.

The problem:

Not only is the lie a sure recipe for failure, but even to a new user, the truth, if he/she was to be informed of it, would do absolutely nothing to help them thrive in this community.

A cabal of upvotes-for-upvotes filled with dust accounts does absolutely nothing, except add bloat.

Reworking Reputation

I’m brainstorming something at the moment, and I hope others would pitch in with some ideas. In no particular order, these are the things that should be considered for calculating the score.

Upvoting Habits

This one is a no-brainer. How good is the user at distributing his/her upvote? Is it concentrated to specific accounts? Does it have a lot of autovoting?

Initiatives

Is the user participating in an initiative at all? Is he/she a curator? A radio host? An onboarding wizard? A tutorial maker? A developer?

Stake and Delegation Habits

Is the user delegating all his/her stake to maximize ROI only? How much Hive-Power is the user holding, compared to the amount earned?

Engagement

Is the user replying to comments? Commenting on other people’s posts? Rewarding comments?

Conclusion

My intention with this post is to get the conversation started. The only conclusion I have, at least at the moment, is that the reputation number next to my handle means nothing. I think we can do better, and maybe we should.
But I’m interested in getting some opinions on this subject.