Yes, this sounds accurate to me, because it follows the general pattern that "enforcement by reputation doesn't scale". It works in small groups, because the f

Yes, this sounds accurate to me, because it follows the general pattern that "enforcement by reputation doesn't scale". It works in small groups, because the feedback loop is relatively quick and relatively difficult to evade. The larger the group, the slower the consequences and the easier it is to find people in the group who don't know your reputation yet. The "solution" which occurs almost immediately to any developer is to automate the reputation, but I think we've seen enough SEO and similar algorithm-hacking to understand how that fails. In fact, "rack up a lot of publications" is itself a method of hacking an attempt at automating reputation.