Tagging @tking7798, @tarazkp and @justtryme90 as this may be relevant as an answer to their own comments.
This "max loss" thingie does not change much for the historical author, and actually, the good idea would be to introduce a way to back-trace long term authorship. For the engagement part, I think we all agree we should focus on the recent stuff.
So how to do that in practice? Well I don't know.
- I am dividing by the root of the number of posts. Maybe this should be modified?
- Or what about a time-dependent half-life? Every time a vote is casted, it acts on the half-life of the future points to be earned. In this way, the more one is active, the longer the point stays. If no activity is recorded during, maybe N days, then the half-life decrease progressively to go back to the nominal value.
Any thoughts?
Yep, that makes sense.
Other than that, I can't add much to the technical conversation :)
If the point of the reputation score is only to decide how to vote on the latest post, then it does make sense to privilege the recent stuff. I think I was thinking it more like an overall badge of merit (basically, a replacement of the steem rep number, since you're making an independent website) and felt awkwardly about discounting the historical contribution of valuable members who for one reason or another are not as present, currently, on the platform.
For the moment, the score is just something funny. Like you said, a kind of badge of merit. This is by no means affecting any future vote as the rules for votes are independent (and clearly stated).
The decaying reputation is more to have a way to slowly remove users that have left. There is a difference between not being present and having left, which is why the half-life is large. However, this may be improved (cf. the above comment by @tarazkp).
It does not change much for the historical author now, but what about after we've been running for 5 years?
I can't think of a better normalizing function to apply in place of the sqrt, given the nature of people and high volume posting. It does a good job of squashing that while bringing up the people who post few posts. Other functions would perhaps open up the middle more, but I don't see how it would help old posters.
Just to come back to this: I am planning to implement a time dependent half-life. In practice, at the time of a vote at x%, x/i% of the value lost by a point is recovered with i being a parameter to fix. I will try that later this month.
Curious to see how this changes the rank ordering.