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Some questions are gold to the asker: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/c%2b%2b?sort=votes . Possibly more gold than can be handled.

I wonder if it can make sense to cap the number of votes that participate in user reputation (but explicitly without capping it onto the question).

Example: You are a C++- and StackOverflow-100-rep-newbie, and ask what is this code doing? and receive so many upvotes for that that you suddenly have 10000 rep. Does the resulting reputation change make sense? With all the consequences (moderator rights, perceived level of C++ competence (by some people at least))? And all this just because a possibly singular, statistical peak in your SO history?

Or shall of the 3000 votes only, say, 100 be counted towards your reputation, therefore relaxing those statistical anomalies a bit?

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  • 3
    There is already a 200 rep cap from up/down votes per day.
    – Toon Krijthe
    Nov 7, 2012 at 14:18
  • 1
    Actually, this is what Jon Skeet proposed a while back, as a replacement of the rep cap
    – Pekka
    Nov 7, 2012 at 14:19
  • 2
    You use 10000 rep as an example. Getting 2000 upvotes on one question would make it the second highest upvoted question in SO history- pretty unlikely for a beginner question- and that's assuming it's perfectly distributed at 40 upvotes a day so as not to hit the cap. Getting 10000 rep for a question just isn't currently possible.
    – David Robinson
    Nov 7, 2012 at 14:32
  • Out of curiosity: How can Jon Skeet have 500142 rep after just 4 years and 1 month, when you really need to commit 200 rep/day over 6.86 years to achieve that?
    – phresnel
    Nov 7, 2012 at 15:07
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    @phresnel Accepts and bounties. Those are not subject to the cap.
    – Daniel Fischer
    Nov 7, 2012 at 15:07
  • @Daniel Fischer: Oh yes, forgot about those; thank you, Daniel.
    – phresnel
    Nov 7, 2012 at 15:10

1 Answer 1

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If an answer can get that many votes, why shouldn't the poster reap the benefit?

Obvioulsy lots of people found the question/answer worthwhile or they wouldn't have clicked the little up arrow.

As already mentioned, there is a 200 a day limit for upvotes, so if the poster got thousands of rep from a single post, it's because new people kept coming day after day and upvoting, showing the staying power of the post and the (most likely) helpfulness to other users. Why shouldn't the poster be rewarded for that?

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