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Demystifying Your Reputation

One of first questions everyone asks us is: “what does my reputation score mean?” The following question usually is: “my reputation just dropped, what did I do wrong?”

This post will try to shed some light on how we compute your reputation.

First of all, your reputation is a number between 1 and 10. 10 is the best score you can get, usually reserved for famous VIPs like Drew Houston.

If we don’t have any clue about who you are, we assign you a 1. It doesn’t mean we think you are a bad person, it’s just that we don’t have any data to make an estimation.

What does the scale look like? It’s clearly pyramidal, with fewer people as the reputation goes up. For instance, only about 10% of our users have a reputation of 5 or above. So if you are at 5, you are doing pretty good! A reputation of 3 or 4 is quite solid.

Moving on to the second question: why does the reputation change by one point or more? Usually, you didn’t do anything wrong (and no, it has nothing to do with the feedback from your latest lunch partner). We make significant changes to the algorithm all the time and the absolute value of the reputation will fluctuate significantly (sometimes by as much as 2 points!). What matters is that your position relative to others hasn’t changed.

So next time you see a significant drop in your reputation, don’t worry: everyone else’s went down as well.