Lowering the privileges threshold depending on popularity of site

Question

I've been using SO and SQA for a while now and, in my opinion, believe the active participation in SQA is somewhat lacking. By this I mean voting questions and answers accordingly in order to see quality results.

People have pointed out in different posts about SO being much more popular which will of course entice people to use that platform in order to receive decent answers, or SQA being about problems so specific that it only applies to a tiny portion of people and thus answers and voting seems to be lacking.

Given this is a site about quality, I feel more should be done to actually reflect that in its use. So, with that in mind I was wondering about the practicality of changing the privilege threshold limits in order to hopefully engage the community more into active participation.

Currently SO and SQA have the same base privileges up to "View Close Votes" of 250 points, where SO suddenly increases.

Doing a quick check of current SQA user reputation shows that: Vote down (125): 1090 of 24804 users (4.4%) have that option.

So my question: Would lowering these ranges help with making the community more active in the community?

Answer 1

To be perfectly honest, I don't believe it would.

First, keep in mind that 125 points is only 25 question upvotes or 13 answer upvotes. If someone asked one question and answered one question every day for a week, they would probably get that 125.

The reason SO increases (or more accurately, SQA is relaxed) is because it has lower activity, being a beta site, you still need to have people that can reach the high end tools for community building. But you can only cut so far - so most of the privileges below 250 are still below 250 because it is reasonable that a willing active participant will not take long to achieve them (especially considering usually, 100 bonus reputation comes from site association.)

The real activity that we need to drive is not the voting so much as the questions and answers. Everything else will come as a natural and expected result of more questions and answers. And you can do that with 1 reputation. So I would conclude that the reputation thresholds are not the barrier to more activity.