Ok, here is a proposition how this problem could get changed. Feel free to comment and give feedback on how you would see such a change:
Right now, each user gets reputation for answering/editing questions and you get badges for special achievements like having good answering scores for a specific tag.
I propose to combine these two systems:
For each tag users would have their own reputation score with a combined total reputation as right now. So as your tag reputation increases you show your experience with this specific tag.
When a new question is asked in this tag, you will see different things depending on your tag score: If you score is low, you directly see "This question seems to be targeting other beginners. Can you answer it?". If you have a high tag score, you see "Warning. This question is targeting beginners. Answering it now will yield no reputation."
After one hour, this text would change to "This question is for advanced users. Answer now for bonus reputation!". Beginners (or better: people new to this site, who have the knowledge) would still be able to answer here and get even more reputation than before.
And at some point, the question goes into the "Late answers" category, where every user will get bonus points.
NOTE: Editing the question/other answers would still give full reputation at any point.
This change would give incentives for reputation hunters to do the following:
- Scout for new questions and edit them as fast as possible
- Check fast answers and edit them to make them better
- Look through older questions with no answers on them and snipe them while getting bonus reputation.
I think all 3 of these points would benefit the site. And hopefully this change is not too difficult implementationwise.
Thoughts?