Can we raise the privilege levels?

Question

PPCG has graduated. Some features for graduated sites come immediately after graduating. However, other features are held off for an indefinite amount of time:

• The site gets a custom theme, and

• Privilege levels, which are initially lowered to help growing beta sites grow, are raised to match the privilege levels of Stack Overflow.

PPCG has been graduated for over two years, but Stack Exchange has not had the resources to make our custom theme. This has held us back from getting our privilege levels adjusted, since traditionally these two changes happen at the same time. But this does not need to be the case. We've received word from the Community team that our privilege thresholds can be adjusted to post-design levels, prior to getting our design. However, we need to check in with you, the PPCG community, to make sure that you are OK with that change before it can happen.

What will happen?

• Our privilege thresholds will be changed to the post-design levels. This means that all users with less than 25,000 reputation will lose some privileges, and will have to earn more rep in order to regain them.

What won't happen?

• We're not getting a design yet. Great things take time.

Please let us know what you think about this proposal.

~ The PPCG Moderation Team

Answer 1

Yes, let's do it

PPCG has a healthy voting culture and a relatively low barrier to entry. This means that it's easy to quickly gain reputation. It's not unusual for new users to gain the close and reopen vote privilege in a week or two. Unless they spend quite a bit of time going over all of our policies on meta, and learning what makes us different from Q&A sites, new users will likely gain that important privilege before fully understanding how to use it, leading to close and reopen votes being applied where they should not (a problem we've already experienced). Raising the thresholds for privileges will reduce this problem. The community will also benefit from other important privileges having higher thresholds, like running in a moderator election and editing freely.

While nobody likes losing privileges, it's not hard to gain reputation on PPCG. Taking a little extra time to learn the policies and participating in the community before earning important, powerful privileges will benefit everyone. Additionally, this will get us one step further to being fully graduated.

Additionally, this will have no bearing on when we get a design - changing the privilege levels only requires the CMs to change a setting. Our design will be on the backlog for the design team regardless.

Answer 2

Let's not do this

As a bit of disclaimer, I am opposed to the whole idea of internet points and gamification, and privilege levels. All registered users should be equal.

Other reasons than my personal opinions:

1. Many of the privileges are actually very useful to the users and allowing them does not really cause any harm. Examples of this kind of privileges are seeing vote counts and deleted posts. Every registered user should have at least these rights. Deleted posts (like sandbox posts) contain useful historical information, and vote counts make it easier to read meta.

2. Reputation is not divided equally. It would be logical to automatically give reputation for participation at our site, but unfortunately this is not the case. Those who post first are upvoted the most, and many times answering an old question does not provide any reputation at all. The system is inherently flawed.

3. This site is not as popular as Stack Overflow. Comparing our privilege levels to theirs is not fair.

What could be possible is to heighten the reputation levels of moderation privileges such as question deletion. However, I don't see how that would be useful as compared to the current situation.

As I think that the current system is better than the new, we maximize the utility we gain by delaying the raising as long as possible.

Answer 3

I wanted to update everyone on what I've been working on because I've seen many discussions, proposals, and improvised solutions about how the Community Team might allocate various "graduation" features with or without a custom design (e.g. increased reputation threshold, elections, migrations, etc).

There hasn't really been a comprehensive solution regarding how this would work sustainably juggling ~173 sites, much less deciding which sites would be eligible and when/how it would get implemented. So efforts to handle each request one site at a time has been caught up in indecision, confusion, and back logs… which does not work. This request is almost nine months old, arg.

I'm taking a different approach.

I've taken it upon myself to write up a comprehensive (i.e. sane <grin>) entire-site life cycle workflow which would include breaking apart everything once bundled up under "graduation", and enabling each feature as soon as a site can support it. It's roughly based on the premise I outlined here — But what happened to Graduation?.

It's hard to say yet how well it will be received in its first draft. Completion and full implementation would likely be at least a few months out, but I suspect this has a much better chance of getting your community what it needs rather than waiting for action on this aging, one-off request.