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How on earth did Noah Schweber (whose contributions to MathOverflow I always greatly enjoy) end up with a negative year reputation for 2020?

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    $\begingroup$ There was a rep recalculation earlier this year (when questions and answers were revalued to be the same). It could be that a bunch of Noah's posts had become community wiki in the interim, in which case this gets counted as negative reputation. Not sure though, that seems like a lot of points to lose in one go. $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2020 at 8:54
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    $\begingroup$ I wonder if it's due to rewarding bounties. $\endgroup$ Aug 23, 2020 at 9:02
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    $\begingroup$ You can expect similar results for other users who often offer bounties. Check, for example, the user Ali Taghavi. $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2020 at 6:57

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They offered almost 4000 reputation in bounties so far this year:

https://mathoverflow.net/users/8133/noah-schweber?tab=bounties

Note that the -4827 is the decrease in rank, not in reputation, that's 'only' -129.

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  • $\begingroup$ Maybe it is also worth mentioning that reputation for questions was changed from +5 to +10 in November 2019. That meant that many users gathered a lot of reputation suddenly - and if they thought they don't need that much reputation, they might have used it for bounties. It seems that there was some increase to the amount of bounties around beginning of 2020. $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2020 at 7:55
  • $\begingroup$ AFAICT in the reputation leagues the new (+10) reputation is still counted in the year when the question was posted. While the loss of reputation caused by the bounty is only recent. $\endgroup$ Aug 24, 2020 at 7:56
  • $\begingroup$ @MartinSleziak I had the impression that when the question value was changed, stack exchange recalculated all reputation totals including historical ones. So that if you now look at, say, the top reputation-getters of 2017, what you're seeing is what the reputation totals would have been, had the question upvote always been 10 rep. So I wouldn't think this change would lead to wonky reports of reputation changes, since those would all be calculated based on the fiction that question upvotes were always worth 10 rep. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Campion Mod
    Sep 1, 2020 at 16:09
  • $\begingroup$ I will add to @TimCampion's comment that my point was mainly that users with enough questions suddenly had more reputation available for bounties. (I probably wasn't clear enough in the above comments. I tried to explain myself a bit better in the MO chatroom. $\endgroup$ Sep 3, 2020 at 6:40

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