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So there's been a bit of talk about maybe raising this site's reputation threshold, potentially locking out users out of the privileges they have for now, making them need to re-earn them again.

I would like to propose to let the users keep whatever privileges they have already earned, to avoid possible reduction in their activity (content moderation, editing, etc) because I can totally see that happening on this site with our current state of affairs (not enough activity to be able to re-earn those convenient for editing privileges back in a sane amount of time, and without creating artificial and not really needed questions for the sole purpose of earning rep).

This proposition could go for any other SE site, but here I'm mostly worried about our editors going away if they see their tools taken away for no good reason.

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    I was going to write an answer, but Shog's answer here reflects my opinion on this. If the site is working properly, we don't need many users at the higher rep levels. The most important privileges come at just 15 rep for upvotes and 125 for downvotes. If we need a lot of users at the higher rep levels (which I don't think we do) we are doing something wrong... – Logan M Feb 21 '17 at 6:38
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    Dozens of other sites have gone through the same, many with fewer high-rep users than we have, so it's strange to me that the reaction to the change is much more pessimistic here. I think it's probably related to the fact that this strange status-quo with a lot of high-rep users has persisted so long. – Logan M Feb 21 '17 at 6:39
  • You're the only user at 20k who won't lose any privileges, also you're a mod on one of the sites, and I might be very biased, so I think we should see what others think of this. – Hakase Feb 21 '17 at 10:25
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    I'm not a regular of this site, and my rep is still a low 1k, but I concur with Logan. Losing privileges due to the official rules doesn't discourage me at all. I believe I'd miss 2k-edit privilege, but I still can suggest edit. I'd probably miss close vote privilege, but still, there are 45 users who will retain it (and this site doesn't have backlog on review queue either). – Aki Tanaka Feb 24 '17 at 10:50
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    @LoganM I can't speak for anyone else, but I'll tell you why I personally am pessimistic about raising the rep levels: because nearly all I do on this site is moderate, and I gain rep at a snail's pace. I started with an association bonus almost three years ago and still haven't cracked 10k. It took me around six months to earn my last 1000 rep. So, at that rate, I'll hit 10k around a year from now, unless I suddenly awaken and decide I love Naruto or something. Then another 4 years until I hit 20k. – Torisuda Feb 25 '17 at 15:51
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    I've had to accept that my taste in anime and the kinds of questions I'm interested in are enough outside the mainstream that there's hardly anything around I'm capable of or interested in answering, and when I ask I don't get much of a response. I can ask a nothing question on Sci-Fi and Fantasy and get 13 upvotes in a few days, but here, 13 upvotes is my fourth-highest voted question, both because the site is so slow and because I ask questions that no one cares about. And I suspect I'm not the only one in this situation. That's why I'm pessimistic about changing the rep levels. – Torisuda Feb 25 '17 at 15:55
  • @Torisuda: I've been thinking about that too. I wonder if we can do something about that... – Makoto Feb 28 '17 at 2:52
  • @Makoto I'm out of ideas for how to address it. Just bringing in more users won't help because we get new users every day, but most of them don't contribute good content and I can't see a greater volume helping that. We'd have to target a certain profile of user that contributes quality content, but I don't know where those people hang out or how to lure them in. Previous initiatives to energize our existing users have failed. I and a couple other people have tried asking more complex questions to raise the tone a little, sometimes with self-answers, but this didn't help. – Torisuda Feb 28 '17 at 3:42
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If we're worried about this, it means one very clear thing: we're not yet ready to become a fully-fledged site.

Whatever efforts we have to undertake to accomplish this should be our next focus, and should be where our energies are spent. The rep levels will change, and as has been mentioned before in comments, hasn't had a negative impact on the communities that have fully graduated.

For comparison, the numbers for this transitional period are simply:

  • 453 users with between 200 and 1,999 reputation
  • 13 users with between 2,000 and 3,000 reputation
  • 45 users with 3,000 or more reputation

Query

If we want to compare that to a fully fledged site, then these are the milestones we'd need users to have:

  • Voting up and flagging posts: 15 rep
  • Voting down: 125 rep
  • Accessing review queues: 500 rep
  • Full edit privileges: 2,000 rep
  • Tag synonyms: 2,500 rep
  • Casting close/reopen votes: 3,000 rep
  • Approving tag wiki edits: 5,000 rep
  • Moderator tools: 10,000 rep
  • Question protection: 15,000 rep

That would mean...

  • 8415 users can't do much moderation of the site
  • 5464 users can upvote and flag posts
  • 762 users can downvote
  • 152 users can access review queues
  • 10 users have full edit privileges
  • 4 users can create tag synonyms
  • 15 users can cast close and reopen votes
  • 17 users can approve tag wiki edits
  • 6 users can access moderator tools
  • 7 users can protect questions

Query

Note that both of these queries aren't accumulative; they're more hard cutoffs than anything else. This is meant to give us a rough idea of the picture.

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  • can you honestly look around at all our accumulated effort here on Anime.SE and say it's not a "real, full-fledged" SE site at this point? I don't think so. In my view, the only thing that separates us from the "bigger" sites is limited capacity for askable questions, because at some point everything a viewer/reader may not be able to understand has been asked and answered, and trying to think of new questions for existing tags will result in asking silly or unnecessary questions that 20 seconds of thinking on your own would answer the question. – Hakase Feb 26 '17 at 19:24
  • Unlike StackOverflow, where code examples, new bugs, etc are found in much larger quantities every day, we have a much smaller capacity for generating warranted upvotes. That's just how it is, and trying to "fix" this by artificially creating unneeded before content is a very bad way to do it IMO. – Hakase Feb 26 '17 at 19:26
  • Some users would suggest that we should go out on an upvote rampage, but I don't think it's a good idea. Historically, the effects of calls to "go and vote" have usually been short-lived, and IMO it is the natural flow of things on such a site. Users already have a sense of when they should or shouldn't vote on something and how. This would be trying to solve the problem of low potential upvotable content by creating a problem of bad voting habits. That said, if JNat says not to worry about it, I'll try not to worry myself. – Hakase Feb 26 '17 at 19:26
  • You may be slightly misconstruing my point here @Hakase. I'm not saying that we need to go out and vote all of the things so more people have more rep; that would be silly and fruitless. I'm also not trying to compare us to Stack Overflow. There's no site in the network that compares to Stack Overflow. I'm saying, if we're to graduate into a full site with a non-beta skin, we should be acutely aware that we don't quite have a lot of users to help with basic non-diamond moderation of the site. – Makoto Feb 26 '17 at 19:35
  • In essence, this means we'll lose those more active editors at lower rep. It's something we're going to have to live with for a while. But, if we're able to maintain our activity levels and get the word out about this Q&A site somehow (and also somehow stave off the wave of users who still think it's OK to ask for ID requests), then things will work out alright. – Makoto Feb 26 '17 at 19:37
  • Alright, you didn't say that, but I just wanted to bring it up in case somebody else would think that's what we should do, coz those things were proposed in a related discussion. – Hakase Feb 26 '17 at 20:11
  • It appears your query lists users with rep within brackets between the described and the next requirement, and not from 1 rep to the described earned privilege. Not sure if that's what you intended to do. It's misleading in case you wanna find out how many users have enough total rep up to the described priv threshold. – Hakase Feb 26 '17 at 20:27

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