Yes, pretty much. The other open question is what Stack Overflow would be if they removed the reputation system entirely.
The literature on motivation from people that subscribe to self-determination theory indicates I think they would mostly prefer the system gone. Any reward system you put in place is bad, it's just there are certain degrees of bad.
My gut tells me that Stack Overflow has benefitted from the reputation system as another explicit feedback on how well you are doing. I think the badges are largely unimportant, save for being a more fun way of saying "here's what you can do on the site" than another tedious FAQ. If the badges were important, then we head down a nasty extrinsic motivation road. I think it's done better with the rep system than without.
That said, I sometimes wonder how many people are put off by the built-in competitive aspect of Stack Overflow; any writing you do is evaluated and measured against others. For competitive people that end up bumped down all the time, that seems like it would be disheartening, for social people always been graded it might be disheartening too. The winner-takes-all set up, rather than, say, a wiki answer that people are constantly tweaking, seems like it could be problematic. I know that I stopped bothering answering questions very quickly as I felt I had no mastery of the art, other people were getting the upvotes, so I felt like my answers were largely ignored.
The literature on motivation from people that subscribe to self-determination theory indicates I think they would mostly prefer the system gone. Any reward system you put in place is bad, it's just there are certain degrees of bad.
My gut tells me that Stack Overflow has benefitted from the reputation system as another explicit feedback on how well you are doing. I think the badges are largely unimportant, save for being a more fun way of saying "here's what you can do on the site" than another tedious FAQ. If the badges were important, then we head down a nasty extrinsic motivation road. I think it's done better with the rep system than without.
That said, I sometimes wonder how many people are put off by the built-in competitive aspect of Stack Overflow; any writing you do is evaluated and measured against others. For competitive people that end up bumped down all the time, that seems like it would be disheartening, for social people always been graded it might be disheartening too. The winner-takes-all set up, rather than, say, a wiki answer that people are constantly tweaking, seems like it could be problematic. I know that I stopped bothering answering questions very quickly as I felt I had no mastery of the art, other people were getting the upvotes, so I felt like my answers were largely ignored.