# Make reputation a function of answer/question score

I'm not sure whether it's technically possible to do.

Problem: let a question get $$20$$ downvotes and $$5$$ upvotes. The question's score is $$-15$$, while the asker's reputation increases by $$10$$. Doesn't make much sense.

Another example: someone asked a terrible question, got $$-5$$, fixed the question. The question is still not that good, but not really that bad. Now people disagree with the question score and upvote it back to $$0$$. Result: the asker got $$40$$ reputation.

Solution: Make reputation a function of a question/answer score. Namely: $$reputation = \begin{cases} score * 10 & \text{if } score \ge 0\\ score * 2 & \text{if } score < 0 \end{cases}$$

• In practice such questions are rare, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to implement a more sophisticated scoring mechanism. Apr 2 at 7:32
• Thinking about this, I guess you are right. I did see similar situations, but not that often.
– user114966
Apr 2 at 16:24
• SO/SE was designed to reward good behaviour, less so to punish bad behaviour. Also, esp. on techy/sciencey sotes we don't usually expect much controversy about how good a post is.
– Raphael Mod
Apr 6 at 21:29