Why does Ben Eiseman's Score climb the max everyday?
Although Ben hasn't answered a question since May 17 his score on answers goes up the max everyday. That's rather unfair to the rest of us.
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4 Answers
Chosen Solution
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What if iFixit employees were exempt from the reputation race? Reputation is supposed to be a measure of how experienced or how helpful you are. Being an iFixit employee already carries a lot of weight, so the amount of reputation that an employee has is rather irrelevant. What if, for employees, the number representing your reputation just said "iFixit Employee", and leave the reputation race to community contributors?
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I'm for it.
+ For a very old western novel writer you are extremely insightful. I don't want to compete with paid employees who are not involved with answering questions. It's fine that they wrote a repair manual. That's what they were paid to do. They got their reward. Management can adjust the points all they want so that their boys go up the limit every day but they risk their very soul doing so. The unpaid experts may just go away.
Your idea has merit. + Ralph
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Ben wrote somewhere around 162 repair guides. You can earn up to 200 points per day from people following repair guides you wrote, and another 200 for answers posts. I detailed how this works a little while back.
I do think there should be a lifetime limit on how much reputation you can earn from a repair guide, but we haven't implemented a per-guide cap yet. We also need to do more to break out where the reputation comes from.
For what it's worth, I think 10K reputation for writing over 150 high quality repair guides is actually low. I'm definitely open to feedback on that, however. Balancing the reputation system is going to be very interesting, and we're keeping a close eye on the economics. FYI: Walter, Andrew, Miroslav, and David Hodson have all earned the majority of their reputation from writing repair guides.
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Kyle, you really don't realize how much time and effort and hours day after day it takes to get to 10,000 points. I would guess 3 hours a day for 6 months. Approximately 550 hours. Besides, you have to be right to get any points at all. I have 118 pages of answers at about 10 answers per page. I could see maybe 5,000 points for a manual, more like 2500. Ask any of the five legitimate people that have made it past 5,000 answering questions how much work it is.
Ben is the exception as he has worked hard and answered a whole lot of questions.
The guys spent a lot of time and effort on those guides too. Something like working 40 hours a week on them.
There's no question there is a ton of time put in by everyone— this is simply an issue of balance. We decided that someone successfully following a repair guide to fix something is approximately the same as someone accepting an answer, and we award 30 points to each. We put a 200 point per day cap on rep each on answers and guides to help balance things out. There is a natural, and good, tension here— as intended. We're definitely open to feedback, and Nat's answer shows some ways we're working to make the point system more transparent.
Thanks for the explanation Kyle. Chris, want to trade paychecks? All I get are some stinkin' points without even a piece of paper to hang on my wall. Where's my Certified Apple Genius Certificate from iFixit for 10,000 points?
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On a different note, as a company we are trying to promote more transparency. One of small things we are doing is a rewrite of the activity page. The following picture is the current working internal version, but could very well change. As you will notice you can see exactly where all of your own reputation came from. While this still won't explain where all of Ben's reputation all came from, it will at least help show what is going on to create your current score.
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I like this +
Me too. + Ralph
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I don't think anyone having high rep is unfair to anyone, since we all have to earn rep the same way. It's not like iFixit employees are getting free reputation.
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It did kind of look that way
If, and I repeat if these are salaried employees working 40 hours a week on these guides then I respectfully submit they are getting a free ride. The rest of us are volunteers devoting varying amounts of our free time to help our fellow men and women with their various problems. I agree with Kyle that some means of determining where a reputation comes from would be a good idea and one I hope will be implemented. Ralph
Well it's very obvious Ralph that our active method of attaining points here cannot compete with those that receive them passively. Just look at Galen, he'll max out on points every day without doing anything new.
Ralph take at look at the breakdown Nat gave. If I do an answer and link it to a teardown, and you vote it up, the guy that wrote the teardown gets 30 points and I get 12. You can't compete with that. Our own actions are beating us unless we don't use the teardowns written by iFixit employees. Then they get even bigger points if the customer actually does the repair but we get nothing. It's a no win for volunteers.
Looks like sometimes they get 50 points if we give a link and it gets upvoted.
7 Comments
Kind of like Bookholt and Galen
by mayer
You make them sound like a comedy troop! (Which they kind of are. Don't let Walter Galen get going off on the World Cup.)
by Kyle Wiens
Another mystery solved--thanks Richard. + Ralph
by rj713
Fine. Sent me, Ralph, Roadkill, Markus, lemrise a pay check of just a tenth what you're paying someone of our caliber or even your shipping clerk and I'll shut up. Almost anyone can write a paid teardown but get out here in field answering questions and we'll see how good your boys are. (Ben excepted). Putting them into competition with the pros that have chosen to help others is obscene. Have you noticed that the referrals to iFixit tear downs has dropped dramatically? If someone buys a part that I directed them to, do I get a commission or even a point or a discount on the parts I buy, I don't think so.
by mayer
I just looked at Ben's breakdown. On points received for an upvote on a question that links to him he has 23 for a total of 1035. That's 45 points for Ben every time I do an answer with a link to him and 12 for me if I get an upvote. I don't think I'll put any links to iFixit employees with this kind of scoring going on. I'll find youtube videos or just direct them to the part.
by mayer
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