I think we all agree on, that not all question pose equal difficulty to answer, and yet upvoting these and the answer(s) to these result in the same reputation gain. Also I have noticed that many "pop science" questions get far more votes and views than really hard and elaborate scientific questions. Also answers to these hard-science questions that are elaborate and well referenced and thus often long (that takes more effort and time to create) may get lower attention and less upvotes than, answers to "pop-science". This results in, that those who take time to answer difficult questions and put effort to do a real nice answer, do not get the same rep and thus acknowledgement, as those who write simple answers to simpler questions.
Therefore I was wondering if a difficulty based reputation system could be introduced, where users with high reputation can vote on the difficulty of the question and the reputation gained from upvotes of the question and the answer(s) provided would be adjusted by this. For eg.in a 1-5 level system
- level 1: 6 rep / upvote to answers
- level 2: 8 rep
- level 3: 10 rep
- level 4: 12 rep
- level 5: 15 rep
also rep for the question could be adjusted similarly - rep gain equals the level of diff. so level 1 gains 1 rep level 5 gains 5 rep.
I think this would encourage users to: Ask more difficult (and scientifically higher quality) questions , and answer more difficult questions. This way the extra effort in producing answers required for elaborate questions could be honored by extra rep.
I think this would improve the quality of the site. I'd be interested in your opinions whether introduction of such feature would make sense, should or shouldn't it be introduced.