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.
Alain, once the score settles down, you should put the scale on the brown box when hovering on the score:n6-10: excellentn5: very goodn3-4: solidn1-2:u00a0not enoughu00a0data
u00a0what I’m curious about is the reputation versus rating — reputation is what letslunch thinks you are? and rating is what the users think you are?
u00a0You are correct, except user feedback doesn’t use the same scale. So if your reputation is 5, like the article says, that’s quite high. But a user giving you a feedback of 5 is pretty weak. The two scales are different and our algorithm will use data from the lunch feedback to update the reputation.