Editor Log: December 2014 (log)

I would like to consider changing our XP requirements for each level, as laid out in the chart below. I received an overwhelmingly positive response to my Editor Log: November 2014 writeup; not a single person opposed the change (except, perhaps, whoever gave the lone downvote) the only complaint I got, if any, was that XP requirements were not lowered even *further*.

I've also being playing around a bit with resetting myself to lower levels, which really drove home for me how even well-established users with dozens of quality writeups have relatively few level powers, something that is easy to forget for longtime Editors and people at very high levels.

I would imagine we can all agree that given the precipitous dropoff in active users, we have a pressing need to try to get what few new users come our way into the system of voting and feedback sooner, which will help them get invested in our site and also get more votes into the system for everyone else.

I actually have a lot of confidence in jaybonci's plan to get the site on a modern footing and (eventually) get a lot more new users, but until then, I'd like to make the XP system gentler on new users. It is stunning to look at Everything's Best Users and see how almost no new users have made it even to Level 1 in the past two years.

This site has been around a long time - forever, really, at least in internet terms - and when we first started, it was a fantastically amazing notion that someone would let you enter text into *their* website and it would immediately appear for all to see. So people were willing to put up with much longer waiting times or effort required to get "powers" that today, more than a decade since blogs and social networks became widely known and easily accessible, most people take for granted and expect from the get-go.

All that said, I do think that to maintain the integrity of our voting system (which is far more robust and meaningful than votes on most other sites, because you do have to put forth some effort, and thus cannot easily game the system) it is still necessary to have at least some requirements before people get 50 votes. Otherwise it would be too easy to just create a bunch of accounts and have them vote up yourself or vote down others, and also, there is great value in keeping the XP system at least somewhat because the idea of a number that keeps going up and gives you new powers is a simple yet powerful form of gamification that works on people's rat brains to encourage them to keep writing new stuff!

Anyway, below is the new system I propose. It starts at 100 XP required for Level 1, and then smoothly ramps up by 100 extra XP required each level until maxing out at 2500 XP required to reach Level 25 (2500 is also the max out under our current system). After Level 24, each new level consistently requires 16000 fewer XP to reach under the new proposal than under the current system.

This means that all current users will jump up a few levels if this change is implemented, but I don't see how this is in anyway a bad thing, really. Lower level users would jump up less - around two levels at the low end - while the very highest level users would jump up more (a maximum of seven levels at the very top end), but these users are so high up that increasing their level doesn't really give them significant new powers anyway.

Simultaneously, I would also like to propose reducing the number of writeups required to reach each new level from 10 additional writeups down to 5. In combination, these two changes would mean that a brand new user would need to write 5 writeups that earn an average of 20 XP each to reach Level 1 and get votes.

Let me know your thoughts!

and so on...