No ads and better privacy

It'd be great if we would show no ads or trackers (quantcast, etc.) for higher rep users. It would have no impact on revenue, basically, but it would show higher regard for them.

Ability to look at deleted comments (unless deleted by moderation).

Similar to the 10K privilege, even higher rep users could gain access to deleted comments.

Edit the "Top Network Posts" List

This is an offshoot of another answer here: show off the posts I'm most proud of.

Currently, a look at my Top Network Questions list makes it look like I spend all my time on ELU.SE:

But that's primarily a function of site traffic, not where I spend my time or what I am most proud of.

Thus, I propose allowing high-rep users to manually customize what appears under "Top Network Posts." This could mean either:

• Allow that a particular site's posts be hidden from in the list.
  • So I could hide all ELU posts. Note that this is different from making ELU private: I don't mind if people know I am an ELU user, I just don't want its posts dominating my list.
• Allow manual selection of individual posts
  • Give me a list of posts to select from that meet some minimum vote threshold. And override the behavior where the current site's posts are ignored in the calculation.

Ability to delete posts without score constraints

Right now it's impossible to delete a post which is upvoted unless you are a moderator. Unfortunately, a lot of poor posts get at least a score of one, and they need elected mod interventions to fix. The ability to clean up these posts would be very welcome.

Ability to lock and unlock posts

This can be limited (e.g. to 1 hour, no override of mods and CMs, etc.), but I don't see why users with enough rep should not be able to intervene and placate edit wars.

See vote counts on tag synonyms

I propose the ability to see vote counts on tag synonyms.

This is indeed a very minor privilege, but I do some tag moderation and I am sometimes curious how the balance between up and downvote on tag synonyms is so it would be nice to have.

There are bounties to encourage good answers. Maybe it would be nice to have a similar super-charged way to reward really good questions by new/low rep users. I've noticed that the ratio of bad to good questions seems to be getting worse. So, users that have achieved a reasonably high level could get the ability to transfer a little of their rep to low rep users asking really good questions (i.e. well written, researched, etc), a little like a bounty for questions. Maybe 10 rep for really good question, and 25 for a superb question (or maybe even 25/50). This might encourage folks willing to spend time to compose good questions, even in areas that don't normally get lots of activity/upvotes.

Ability to Accept Answers on Abandoned Questions

The sites are littered with questions that have an answer that clearly resolves the original question, but that has not and probably never will be marked answered because the asker has abandoned the question and/or his account.

Not even moderators can accept an answer for a question. And the existence of these zombie "unaccepted" questions thwarts searches for questions that could use attention from a new expert. (Believe me: I've tried to be helpful by going through questions with hasaccepted:no on a number of sites, but after seeing so many perfect-but-unaccepted answers I realized it's a waste of time.)

At some level of experience we can trust users to designate an "accepted answer." To mitigate any concerns this feature could be implemented with the following limitations:

1. This only applies to questions with at least one upvoted answer but no accepted answer.
2. A user cannot accept his own answer to another user's question.
3. Only answers with positive net votes can be accepted.
4. The accept rep goes (if anywhere) to the original asker
5. Only questions by users who have not been seen in at least a month can have an answer accepted for them.

Finally, if the asker ever comes back and for any reason doesn't like the accepted answer he can change or unaccept it, as usual.

Ability to add and remove post notices

This is actually super needed on Skeptics or any other site that uses them. It would also promote the usage of notices which we've found is usually a better strategy than commenting for repetitive comments (if it looks official, it becomes impersonal).

status-declined Oct. 23, 2015 (Jon Ericson)

I think there's a good idea here, but it needs fleshing out. In particular, what can we put on this page that will be useful to high-reputation users that won't be useful for a brand new user? The most obvious thing is data on activities that require elevated privileges. We have something like that in the 10k tools page. (That page could use a makeover, by the way.) In addition, the added site analytics for 25k users seems to cover some of the ideas below.

What's New Dashboard

Give high rep users access to a page that shows recent posts in their favorite tags. All questions from the past day, for example. Each post should have relevant stats that help guide the user to whether they should try to provide a new answer (how many answers, what's the min/max/avg votes on the answers). They can use these tools to min/max their further reputation gains.

Also throw in some other current trends for the site (I'm terrible with analytics, someone suggest some details) that just show current site activity, at a higher level than the review stats page. Maybe show amount of activity (posts & comments) in popular tags for the day/week/month? Or show some detailed analytics for the user's recent posts, like which posts have the most views and least views? Tools that give them an idea of what's working and not working on the site in terms of traffic.

Add a hovercard for accepted or highest scoring answer when looking for a question

The one thing that really annoys me when I'm searching for questions is that I can barely see any information about the accepted answer (or highest voted answers for questions without an accepted answer). There's an expanded hovercard for users that contains some basic information about them. However, when you are looking at a question and you hover your cursor over it, it contains no info about the accepted answer:

I think there ought to be at least a little bit of information about the accepted/highest scoring answer when you hover over it, like it's score, answerer, and time it was answered.

View the time votes were cast

Sometimes I come across posts that have been downvoted and edited. However, I have no way of knowing if it was downvoted mostly before or mostly after the edit. It would be convenient to be able to see when all the votes were cast so I can infer more accurately why they were cast. I think this would be good as a 1.5k privilege to fill in the gap between 1k and 2k.

status-declined Oct. 24, 2015 (Jon Ericson)

Questions get bumped when they are edited. There's no way to know if the edit is minor (removing an unneeded tag) or major (c++ => python). Sometimes you want to bump a question for community review. Breaking this rule is bound to be confusing with minimal gains.

By the way, limiting your retag efforts to one or two questions a day seems like a bad idea. Having been active on a tiny site (< 2 questions a day) I understand why it's awkward to flood the page with trivial edits. But it's far better to rip the bandaid off in one go than to dribble them out over days and weeks. Just do it and if anyone complains, ping me. I'm saving up a rant for that occasion. ;-)

This is adapted from this suggestion:

The first 10 tag-only edits per day to questions not on the front page do not bump the question on the front-page

The number 10 can be debated and one could add an additional criterion that the question must have a given age.

I sometimes come across a situation, where I want to retag a small bunch of older questions, e.g., to apply a new tag to appropriate old questions or to clean up an overused tag. Such a job would bump the respective questions to the front page, and thus on small pages, it’s usually considered best to only retag a one or two questions at a time and wait until they trickled down before editing the next ones. This is obviously quite annoying and makes me often refrain from such an undertaking altogether.

The rate limit is to avoid vandalism by rage-quitters or overzealous editors, who want to retag everything.

An alternative way to implement this would be to have such questions bumped with a probability of 10 % (or similar) and to always bump the first such question each day. This way, some of the respective questions would appear on the front page and thus be subject to control.

The questions may still be bumped in certain tag-specific views and similar to tag subscribers do not miss the questions.

I'm sure this isn't going to be received well, but...

Nothing.

In my mind, and maybe not everyone disagrees, a high reputation user should be someone who is knowledgeable and provides quality content.

These perks give too much incentive to 'game' the system and aggressively moderate, which I don't think is healthy, and is already happening fairly frequently.

If you look at where these users' reputation comes from (my own included), you'll see that it's primarily from answering and asking basic, bordering on stupid, questions that are asked frequently by students and new developers. Some users take this a step further by optimizing the question for search indexing, and then aggressively closing duplicates and referring users to their own content; which is likely also a duplicate of an older question, itself.

These perks just incentivize people to sit around all day and play Stack Exchange like a game. While there's no value to having five duplicates of 'What does << mean in Java?' asked and answered each day, I think it's also detrimental for users to receive perks (specifically, privileges) for aggressively moderating these questions.

status-declined Oct. 24, 2015 (Jon Ericson)

Votes are like opinions: everybody has one. Voting isn't always scientific, but it's pretty much the best option we have to divide helpful content from unhelpful. Weighting the opinions of high reputation users (who can throw some weight around in comments and chat in any case) seems counterproductive. There's also the complication of building a UI for a very small fraction of users.

Supervotes.

At some very high rep level -- say 50k -- the user might get 3 daily "supervotes". A supervote is in all respects just like multiple regular up or down votes: let's say a supervote is worth 3 up or down votes. These would be incredibly handy in righting wrongs: degrading an accepted but wrong answer, or rewarding a great answer that's gotten buried in the noise. I see these situations on a regular basis; it would be great to have a little extra muscle to help fix them.

Ability to Favorite a User

Ok, I know this have been a feature request a while ago and have been shot down, due to it converting the SE sites into a social network. But I don't think this will hurt if it's available for just the 10K users.
The purpose could be to read more of their posts in future or probably even to track the user's suspicious behaviour. I have never seen the mod tools for 10k+ users, so I have no idea if it's already available or not. But it'd be a nice addition, if it isn't already available.

status-declined Oct. 24, 2015 (Jon Ericson)

Besides other problems, the chat super ping has an awkward interface that makes it a hassle. Sorry to burst your bubble. ;-)

The ability to "superping" any user

I'm not a mod, but I understand this is a power that exists... Maybe it will be helpful to address users directly, without hassle.