What is the average time distribution of reputation accrual?

Question

I am wondering if anyone has analyzed average reputation points accrued over time.

Given that posting a good answer to a question will accrue a total of x points over a year, I imagine there must be some kind of curve that looks like this, on average:

• first 30% of total reputation points accrued within 12 hours
• add'l 20% accrued hours 12-24 (cumulative 50% within a day after posting)
• add'l 20% accrued days 2-7 (cumulative 70% within first week)
• add'l 15% accrued days 8-30 (cumulative 85% within first month)
• final 15% accrued months 2-12

And I imagine the curve could be somewhat different, depending on different factors:

• Stack Exchange community (Stack Overflow, Meta, etc.)
• Whether the answer was accepted
• Number of upvotes given to the question (within first hour, day, week, etc.)
• Number of answers at time of posting
• Reputation score of the person providing the answer
• etc...

I'm getting more involved in the Stack Overflow community, and it would be interesting to estimate the total value of my activity, based on the early response.

If I spend an hour answering questions, and a day later I see that I got 50 reputation points from that activity, what's the long-term value? Can I expect it to "grow" from 50 to 80 over the next month, or year? Or to 100? Maybe 150?

Answer 1

I found an existing query on data.stackexchange.com, maybe this is what you are looking for?

The query displays the reputation grouped by date, not exactly the kind of long-tail view you are looking for but imported into a spreadsheet you could do a quick graph and check the reputation change for a single user.

My SQL is not really enough to modify this query to build this graph over all users, especially not this early in the morning. 😴