During a chat tonight with @michellebrous, she suggested that SourceCred could take time-to-response into account in attributing cred. This could be pretty valuable for triage cred, where resolving or responding to an issue in a timely fashion is really valuable.
Has to be carefully balanced somehow with the quality of the response as well, as otherwise you’ll have a bunch of people trying to get in responses similar to “FIRST!!!11” you see on popular content, without providing much value.
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@victor: Agreed. Stack Overflow and co. have historically suffered from this to a fairly large degree. The effect is particularly pronounced there due to the velocity at which questions are proposed and answered. A user who posts a decent answer to a just-added question can easily get a handful of upvotes within minutes; further users who visit the page are unfortunately unlikely to scroll down to see more thoughtful answers. Compounded with the fact that Stack Overflow allows not only edits (so that you can post a decent answer immediately to “stake your turf” and then improve it at your leisure) but also ninja edits (edits by the OP within five minutes of posting do not create an entry in the publicly visible audit log), and the “fastest gun in the West” effect quickly becomes a real problem that detracts from quality.
Perhaps the differences that we want to find are not those between a 30-second response and a 40-second response, but rather those between a 1-day response and a 6-month response. A thoughtfully chosen nonlinear mapping from “time to response” to the heuristic output might be helpful in encouraging responses that are both prompt and helpful.
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