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Currently each site has it's own reputation rating which shows either expertise or trust in a particular user. This rating is useful for a number of things first of all it gives a number of rights to users second of all it allows us to place bounties and thirdly it shows an "expertise" number of how good a particular user is in a particular subject.

The fact that each site offers it's own reputation does however have some consequences:

  1. I'm unable to offer bounties on different sites, I have quite a bit of reputation built up on Game Dev however I often find myself with problems on Stack Overflow, this means that I cannot use my hard earned reputation on Game Dev to help me resolve my problems (they would be off topic there).
  2. Reputation represents trust, currently many privileges are bound to your level of reputation, this mean that a user can be trusted with full moderator rights on one site yet only have 101 reputation on another not even allowing him to review users first posts.

The solution:

make a single global tracker of all reputation displayed besides the current reputation meter on each site, this global reputation can be used as an alternative supply of reputation for bounties at a lower exchange rate (say 2 reputation for each point offered in bounty and can be used to unlock a number of privileges (but not all)). This would mean that a user who is very well known and in high regards on one website can actually do more then a user who spend a single afternoon on a particular website.

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  • Reputation, not karma. And personally I don't want such a thing, since cooking skills got nothing to do with programming skills. If you want, add the global flair (which does show the total network reputation) to your profile.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 11:57

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The point of reputation is to indicate:

  1. How much you participate
  2. How knowledgeable you are

about the topic of the site. Nothing more, nothing less. The 100 reputation account association bonus is enough to get you the basic privileges on a new site (voting, flagging, commenting everywhere) but doesn't give you the down-vote privilege (for example) as you haven't proved you know anything about the topic.

The fact you know a lot about topic X doesn't necessarily mean you know a lot about topic B and you shouldn't be able to use your reputation from X on B - that would be unfair (to say the least) to those who are experts in B.

There are areas such as Game Development/Stack Overflow or Programmers/Stack Overflow where the domains overlap, but they are the exception rather than the rule. While it might be possible to implement something like this for these areas the benefit doesn't come anywhere near outweighing the cost.

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