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¹ _{It's true that recruiters and interviewers often look at candidates' contributions on sites like Stack Overflow and Ask Ubuntu. But the main thing they're looking for is probably not the reputation score itself.}

¹ _{It's true that recruiters and interviewers often look at candidates' contributions on sites like Stack Overflow and Ask Ubuntu. But the main thing they're looking for is probably not the reputation score itself.}

As Bruno Pereira says, "No one cares about karma in launchpad (at least not to be worrying about it)," and I consider that a feature, not a bug. Asking and answering questions is important, but there's little risk that people will think AU rep is a measure of someone's overall contribution to Ubuntu, because it's readily apparent that many other things that go into Ubuntu--like writing actual code and debugging it until it seems to work right--happen mostly in other places. In contrast, Launchpad is the broader of the two sites: it has answers, but also bugs, code, blueprints, and translations, and covers way more projects than just Ubuntu.

In conclusion, I don't think it would be good to incentivize scurrying to maintain a high rate of posting. Reputation is a compelling idea -- more compelling, perhaps, than it should be. If any major change to the reputation system on Ask Ubuntu (and, more generally, Stack Exchange) is to be made, I think the goal should not be to increase the power rep has over us. If anything, it would be best to decrease the amount of motivation that comes from rep, so as to encourage us all to work on that which interests and inspires us.

As Bruno Pereira says, "No one cares about karma in launchpad (at least not to be worrying about it)," and I consider that a feature, not a bug. Asking and answering questions is important, but there's little risk that people will think AU rep is a measure of someone's overall contribution to Ubuntu, because it's readily apparent that many other things that go into Ubuntu  -- like writing actual code and debugging it until it seems to work right  -- happen mostly in other places. In contrast, Launchpad is the broader of the two sites: it has answers, but also bugs, code, blueprints, and translations, and covers way more projects than just Ubuntu.

In conclusion, I don't think it would be good to incentivize scurrying to maintain a high rate of posting. Reputation is a compelling idea -- more compelling, perhaps, than it should be. If any major change to the reputation system on Ask Ubuntu (and, more generally, Stack Exchange) is to be made, I think the goal should not be to increase the power rep has over us. If anything, it would be best to decrease the amount of motivation that comes from rep, so as to encourage us all to work on the things that interest and inspire us.

Even though it's not given as one of the official reasons, in my opinion the most important reason for Launchpad karma to decay is to avoid fooling people into thinking it's a measure of a person's overall value to the whole community. This is not generally quantifiable, and even if it were, Launchpad participation couldn't reveal it since a lot of the work that makes Ubuntu better happens in other places: upstream projects (GNU and Linux, among many others, often hosted on GitHub and such places), Debian, other distros, Canonical, here on Ask Ubuntu, the wiki and help, forums, LoCos, and way, way more. (For example, have you ever SSHed into -- or out of -- Ubuntu? That's thanks to OpenBSD.)

Even though it's not given as one of the official reasons, in my opinion the most important reason for Launchpad karma to decay is to avoid fooling people into thinking it's a measure of a person's overall value to the whole community. This is not generally quantifiable, and even if it were, Launchpad participation couldn't reveal it since a lot of the work that makes Ubuntu better happens in other places: upstream projects (GNU and Linux, among many others, often hosted on GitHub and such places), Debian, other distros, Canonical, here on Ask Ubuntu, the wiki and help, forums, LoCos, and way, way more. (For example, have you ever SSHed into -- or out of -- Ubuntu? That's thanks to OpenBSD.)