Give some to get some. Should seeking help be "taxed" with giving some in return (eventually)?

I am a big supporter of the concept of a self-moderating community. At the same time, I strongly believe everyone in a community should participate in it in a way that creates a net positive effect (or at least - break even). In order for this to work (and work efficiently) the value creation (asking good questions, giving good answers, comments, and positive moderation as a whole) should exceed the value "consumption" (in general - receiving help) or at least equate it. Of course, the full execution of this model is kind of utopic, but the community should strive to reflect it as close as possible.

Okay, enough with the philosophical banter and onto the clickbait-y title.

We can generally separate the community members into three general groups:

1. Value Consumers - members who use the platform solely to satisfy their own needs.
2. Members who participate actively by asking good questions and provide value by answering and moderation.
3. Members who use the platform to primarily create value by helping others (once again, by answering and moderation).

Obviously, groups 2 and 3 should be highly valued as indeed they create the net positive effect for the whole community. In short, they're the value creators and we all should be grateful for them.

So, to the topic itself:

Now, in order to improve further, what can we do to increase the efficiency and move more members from team "consumers" into group 2 or possibly even group 3?

Introduce a mechanism that connects the ability to receive help (by asking questions) to the user's reputation value creation actions. And yes, there is a difference between reputation and value creation. Let's consider a mechanism that uses tickets for brevity - one ticket = one question (the ability to ask one).

A freshly registered user starts with [5-10] tickets. From this point on, tickets are earned by basically being useful to the community:

• Asking a good question that nets a positive score (which means thateither the question is beneficial to someone else or is an overallclear, well-structured question).

  For every [3-5] upvotes on your questions (from your own pool of questions, not from a specific one) you're granted a new ticket.

• Giving valuable answers to questions (including your own ones).

  For every [2-3] upvotes on answers (once again, from your general pool) you're granted a new ticket. For accepted answers (excluding your own questions) you're granted [1-2] tickets.

• For every approved flag you get a ticket.
• For every [2-3] approved suggested edits you get a ticket.

The same goes for review queues and higher moderation actions, but members with those privileges should already be more involved in the process.

Now, it is important to note that this mechanism is not to handicap new users but to promote collaboration and introduce them to community guidelines and moderation.

So, in short:

What's the purpose?

Convert more members of the community from pure value consumers to community beneficial value creators.

Who is affected?

This should affect only users who solely "consume" by asking bad, poorly structured questions in bulk. Seasoned users shouldn't be affected at all by this, as they've basically accrued the tickets naturally (if they need them at all).

What does the community get from this?

1. Higher overall collaboration between members.
2. New members (and naughty ones) get introduced to the community guidelines sooner.
3. Overall more clear, well structured, and formatted questions.
4. Fewer duplicate questions.
5. Higher moderation participation which leads to a better platform and community in general.
6. Fewer items in review queues.

Potential risks?

1. People abusing the system by posting bad answers/comments/edits to get around and score some tickets.

Solution: The platform already has a mechanism to prevent that so it shouldn't be a problem.

2. Creating new accounts to bypass the restrictions.

Solution: ? Should there be any?

What are the drawbacks?

I personally don't see any, but this is the topic I am most interested in getting feedback on.

The given ticket values and mechanism in general are exemplary. Everything is open for discussion.

Also, this is a general topic that affects all of the Q&A sites in the network (and not only) but I've put it here instead of the mother META because, in my opinion, it will mostly benefit the Stack Overflow community.

EDIT:

First of all, thank you all for the feedback.

I would like to comment on some of the points given.

As a starter, I would like to point out that reputation and contribution are not the same thing at all and the former doesn't necessarily represent the latter. Oleg made a great point about this in the comments below referencing FGITW. The reputation system is utterly flawed.

Simple example: A one-sentence question/answer about Git or how to hide an element in CSS posted in the period 2011-2013 can net you north of 100k reputation (and will continue to build passively for the foreseeable future). On one hand, yes, your question/answer has helped a lot of people having this exact (no matter how trivial) problem. On the other hand, this will require a total of 3,333 questions/answers each of which being upvoted (without any downvotes) three times for someone who is giving assistance at present times to achieve the same reputation gain. I am not complaining about that, I am just pointing out that the system is not objective and doesn't represent actual contributions.

The only way for this to be somewhat objective is to compare profiles relative to their registration date, activity time frame, participation in specific tags, and topics, which obviously can't happen.

Furthermore:

1. Edits don't award reputation (after 2k reputation and excluding tag wikis). [edited for clarity]
2. Doing reviews don't award reputation.
3. Flagging doesn't award reputation.
4. Giving good answers doesn't necessarily provide adequate reputation.

I strongly believe that privileges shouldn't be based on reputation, but we don't have a better, more accurate system so it is what it is.

The next point is that all the feedback was related to the worst-case scenario in which we assume that the malicious user X has exhausted all of his tickets and now has to start producing dummy suggested edits in order for him to continue on his quest to make the life of reviewers (both post and edits) a nightmare. And this is presented as the general case.

10 tickets (questions) is not something you "spend" in a single day. More realistically, it will take you a few months. This is a very important point. It is not like you register and you have to start "earning". You don't have any obligations. You have a question - you just ask. If the question is clear and well structured - you receive help and get upvotes. If not - you don't. You basically have 10 chances to screw up, but I don't think anyone actually aims for this as they just lose their time.

Now, to be honest, I wasn't completely aware of how the current question ban system works because I haven't actually encountered it. Now I see the similarities.

On your journey, it is expected that you're gonna score a few upvotes from your questions. Those upvotes award tickets and are actually the main source for askers to accrue them. If you didn't, most probably your questions are bad and should be edited (same solution the question ban counts on). We arrive to the scenario where you're not much of an upstanding member. So you have four solutions:

1. Edit your questions in order to improve them(both to receive help and earn upvotes/tickets).
2. Try to be useful to the community by helping others by answering/commenting. If you do good - you get upvotes and thus tickets. If you don't, you get downvotes and deleted posts which eventually leads to a suspended account.
3. Try to improve other's posts by suggesting edits and flagging bad content. Now, this is a pretty tricky one indeed, I completely agree. If a person can't make his own questions good, how should anybody count on him to edit others' questions? That's a completely valid point. The only thing I would say here is that suggested edits don't award anything. Accepted edits do. Rejected ones lead to privileges suspension and eventual account suspension. In any case, I agree this is not a good idea.
4. Create a new account. No good solution against this no matter what.

Regarding:

First of all, it allows people to continue asking bad questions as long as they are doing enough community work (suggesting edits). This, IMHO, lowers the question quality instead of raising it.

People will continue asking bad questions until they have an incentive to stop doing so. Like I pointed out in point 3 above, suggested edits don't award anything, only accepted ones do. However, like I already mentioned, I wasn't that aware of the question ban mechanism so my suggestion was a solution to prevent such behaviour and now I know such already is in place.

Another good point from Scratte is:

Apart from edits and answering giving tickets, I think there's anotherslight flaw here. You say that people "get helped" by postingQuestions. But lots of users post because the Question is missing fromthe repository. They even post their own Answer on it. It's likemaking a word-encyclopedia and then someone saying "Hey, 'dinosaur' ismissing here. Let me add it". It doesn't matter who puts in thedescription, it was missing all along. Saying Question-askers isgetting help is focusing on the poster, not the post.

In short: like mentioned, people who post "wiki" type of questions generate tickets from the upvotes to the questions. They're not getting help, they're giving some. That's indeed why I addressed this point preemptively in the original question and those members are actually part of groups 2 and 3.

Lastly, I don't think this should be compared to pay-to-play(referencing Oleg's "paywall" association). This should be viewed as a tool for building a stronger community. It can't really be compared to a capital generation scheme model.

To close the topic, I've done some quick "analysis" to see how many users would be affected. Here are some interesting facts, according to Stack Overflow data explorer:

<BlinkingEffect>Please, ignore the repetition and total inefficiency of my epic queries</BlinkingEffect>

There are 14,171,069 users exactly 0 of which have more than 10 questions and 0 answers. On the other hand there are 37,319 users with 10+ questions and exactly 1 answer. In this setting, the questions per user are in the range [11-974] and the reputation varies between [1-122,390]. The average question score is in the range [-2.09-144.69]. From those 37,319 users, 3,351 have 0 or less average question score. From them, only 1,499 have visited the site the last 6 months.

And just for funzies, if we say that a user starts with 10 tickets and each 2 points of question score award a new ticket we get that 19,534 users have exhausted their tickets, 11,379 of which are in the range [-5-0] and 15,615in the range [-10-0]. The champion has 974 questions, a reputation of 13,397, average question score of 0.94 and -506.22 tickets!

It's important to note that we take only question upvotes into consideration and ignore everything else.

Once again, thank you all for the feedback provided.