"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%"
That seems to indicate that stack overflow had considerable growth in the number of contributors, relatively few of which acquired large scores (for example, if there were no 'effortless scoring', they would need 33% growth of users who all have lower scores in order to make the former top 4% become the new top 3%)
That might be an indication that there are fewer users who play the "I want points" game. It would require access to quite a bit more data (who joined when, what do the distributions of scores look like, etc) to prove that, though.
If it turns out that there still are lots of users chasing high scores, I think it might be worthwhile for Stack Overflow to play with different scoring functions. For example, h-index is popular in scientific papers. One could do a SO h-index (has X answers that got at least X upvotes). Maybe, to encourage diversity, one could add "... With X different tags" to the requirement.
That seems to indicate that stack overflow had considerable growth in the number of contributors, relatively few of which acquired large scores (for example, if there were no 'effortless scoring', they would need 33% growth of users who all have lower scores in order to make the former top 4% become the new top 3%)
That might be an indication that there are fewer users who play the "I want points" game. It would require access to quite a bit more data (who joined when, what do the distributions of scores look like, etc) to prove that, though.
If it turns out that there still are lots of users chasing high scores, I think it might be worthwhile for Stack Overflow to play with different scoring functions. For example, h-index is popular in scientific papers. One could do a SO h-index (has X answers that got at least X upvotes). Maybe, to encourage diversity, one could add "... With X different tags" to the requirement.
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