But then you agree with me (or I failed miserably at making my point). What you describe in the second paragraph is what I meant, I agree with all of what you said.

Nothing really bad happens if you lose the hat ;)

Yesss exactly, that's what I mean.

You can turn off cowboy hat notifications and hide your hat, effectively opting out.

The cowboy hat is meant to be a little Easter egg game for those that want it.

YES ! 🤠

I shouldn't have used the hat in my argument, I obscured my own point. Yes, it is. Copy/pasting from an answer I gave below: The hat in itself doesn't matter at all, I'm not saying that. What matters is how much time you have it because that's a measure of activity that is erased. That's the status, not the hat in itself. Besides that, it's not the sole point of my argument, nor the most important. My argument is that the same way the hat is defined, the ranking is defined, which I consider detrimental in the way I described.

Rewards go to people based on a combination of posts/comments and zapping posts/comments.

The more people zap your posts/comments, and the more you zap posts/comments that other people like (the bigger and earlier the zap the better), the more likely you are to get rewards.

I personally won't address the ranking system by now, for that's a whole beast that might use some holistics and doesn't really have to be perfect by the day but at least fair enough in its long term tendency. That tendency could have random noise added and would still be cool. The problem is scoring based solely on single day activity, which is very discouraging, because that ensures an overall negative tendency in both ranking and rewards in the long therm if not cared by the day, which is tiresome and haves the negative impact of forcing interactions and engagement which can take a toll in the long term and end up causing the opposite effect: repelling stackers from SN.

I did not understood the last part of your comment, but regarding the first part, yes, I agree, that's exactly what I (tried to) brought up.

That's simply not true. Averages are an optimal tool for detailed and fast-paced high quality control systems which I personally use for my own work (embedded systems). Reality of computation is the opposite of what you described: primitive, slow and low memory systems had to rely on nearly zero history data and thus where un-optimal and jerk-prone. Computational power allowed for historical data to be processed to judge real time data and thus take better real-time decisions.

It does, but i think that doesn't matter, in this case I'm referring to the hat as a "reward" only in the sense of a badge. It might not be important in itself to a user personally, but it does is a metric that influences interactions for it boosts confidence. Losing it day by day ends up defeating its purpose because it motivates blind zapping just to keep it, thus not being any more a good metric of user activity nor a good way to motivate good content compensation