I very much agree with what you are saying here. The current reputation system basically has no meaning. I'm probably one of the ones you are referring to in the paragraph on "current use cases." After my time in sndbox I no longer recieved any votes for posting, so it no longer made sense to spend hours writing articles each day so I stopped and focused on my studies. commenting was also hard because it could only be done on a laptop. As such, my engagement was nonexistent for a time and my reputation stayed low. So in that case the reputation score does tell users something about the account - as you pointed out. Since downloading the @partiko app I've been able to comment from my phone so I'm engaging much more - Commenting quite a lot each day actually. As a result I'm growing much faster. But despite my activity and engagement I'm watching many others round me grow a 100X faster. When people own multiple accounts to vote for themselves and they can buy votes from bots and therefore buy a reputation, a reputation score becomes essentially meaningless - as you pointed out. I stopped buying votes so now I'm just chugging along, growing slowly but surely. But t least I'm having fun doing it hahaha.
I think that you raise a lot of good points in your article and am glad you are creating a dialogue on the topic and actively working to solve it. I cant help but feel though that it will fall on deaf ears though. People with high reputations probably wont want to change the system that they benefit from and people with low reputations probably do not have any power to make change. That's super negative for me to say and very cynical. So Dont give up on this keep talking about it and discussing :)
Posted using Partiko Android