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Is there or can there be a counter that shows how much reputation my participation in the SE sites has given to other users? For example, when I vote up or down a question or an answer, mark my question answered etc.

The thought behind this question is the network effectans the community of users, who are helping each other

The current reputation scale is only self centered ans the way to receive more reputation comes sometimes at the expense of others

Knowing each other contributed to the community, even if not by score but by number of votes, comments etc and/or measure them for reputation advancement will encourage answering even if the answer is not accepted or voted, or even if voted down - encourage participation and cooperation...

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  • 6
    This seems counterproductive, if for no other reason than it encourages users to upvote to see the number go up, instead of properly curating content.
    – fbueckert
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:34
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    @fbueckert i mean, when you upvote, the number goes "up" with or without this feature!
    – Kevin B
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:39
  • you've got a point there (why can't it be an answwr to my question?)... my original thought was to show a sort of community contribution, rather than your own effort-competition scale (my rep is at the expense of othee answers and I get dowbvoted)
    – Guy L
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:41
  • You can already see in your profile how many of each kind of vote you've cast, so you can roughly estimate how much rep you've given to other users via upvotes. you cant get an exact measurement because it doesn't distinguish between upvotes and downvotes on the question/answer totals, but it is enough to estimate.
    – Kevin B
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:43
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    Community contributions aren't tied to votes alone; that only gets a small aspect of it. It also assumes that upvotes are contributions, and downvotes are not, when downvotes are arguably more a contribution than an upvote it.
    – fbueckert
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:50

2 Answers 2

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I don't think this is a very good idea. Voting is only a small part of what contributing positively to the community means, and you're only focusing on a single aspect of it; reputation that you've given to others.

Downvoting, by itself, is arguably more important for content curation than upvoting, and keeping the signal-to-noise ration high. By your metric, it would be a bad thing, because you'd be taking reputation away from users for doing so. So by that aspect alone, this idea's not off to a good start.

There's also so much more to contribution than voting, up or down. There's also close voting, voting to reopen, deleting bad content, flagging spam, and other junk, and so on and so forth. None of that gives reputation, but is all needed to be done, regardless. It's already thankless. Let's not disincentivize it more by actively equating it as a negative contribution to the site.

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As fbueckert said in a comment, that might lead to some kind of gaming the system, so not necessarily a good idea.

However, if you're just genuinely curious (or some kind of creepy stalker), you can do some quick math and get a result of sorts.

The following works for you, OP...

Go to your profile (or anyone's for that matter, it's public info), scroll down to votes cast.

votes by Guy L

As of today, on Meta, you've cast 5 upvotes, 0 downvotes. Out of 5 upvotes,

  • 2 were on questions, multiply that by +5: you awarded 10 rep points.
  • 3 were on answers, multiply by +10, you awarded 30 rep points.
  • you've accepted one answer (here), and since it wasn't a self-accept, you gave +15 rep.

I'm not sure it extends to the whole network, so you might have to do that on each site. Accepts however are visible network-wide, so it's a bit easier: take out everything that isn't per-site meta or self-acceptance, and multiply by 2. Granted, that gets painful when you have a lot of accepts network-wide, but this info is calculable.

... but that's only because you didn't cast many votes yet.

And especially, no downvotes. Also did not approve edits yet (+2 rep for editor), which are probably hard to track too since they can be done by anonymous users (no rep given).

Note that the vote counters don't distinguish between questions and answers. Meaning, this very answer is correct in your case, but not on a bigger scale, for people who cast so many upvotes and downvotes that it gets too hard to sort by Q/A, just by checking their profile activity's "votes" tab.

I tried to look around for a more mathematically accurate way to do this, and stumbled accross Search by keyword for answer / question I upvoted. A tweak would have been to use such a search operator along the lines of upvotedbymeandcontains:"the" is:a (because likely a good chunk of posts contain "the"), but such a feature doesn't exist yet, so the result will indeed get murky quite soon.

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  • And of course the usual SEDE dark magic probably applies, but haven't used that yet.
    – Jenayah
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:45
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    This gets super complicated, super fast, if there's even double digits. You can't really calculate it well if there's any sort of dilution between up/downvotes, or question/answers.
    – fbueckert
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:45
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    SEDE won't work, all votes (except favorites and bounties, which are stored as votes) are anonymized.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:47
  • @Glorfindel alright, would have thought there was a way to do that on your own stuff at least, but as said above, never used it. Thanks for the info!
    – Jenayah
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:49
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    eh, you can calculate well enough even for large numbers. Just make it a fraction and guesstimate.
    – Kevin B
    Sep 25, 2018 at 19:49
  • The base of my idea came from today: I asked a question and received 4 answers, 3 of which were good and answered my question. They all received my upvote for it. The correct answer for the best by far. This is the opposite from the treatment I get for givibg good answers... better sometimes than the ones marked as correct. SE's model is CV and jobs based on rep, so, on their side, it should matter also. The foul playbis obvious, maybe there's another mechanism for my on generating others' rep
    – Guy L
    Sep 25, 2018 at 20:05
  • @GuyL the answer marked as correct is only the one which OP deemed the most helpful to them. If there's a better-liked answer, the community will upvote it more - one should sometimes, especially on SO for instance, look at the votes rather than acceptance. As per generating other's rep - the idea is to vote for content, not users. If you really want to reward someone, you can always set up a bounty - providing their answer is worthy of it, of course.
    – Jenayah
    Sep 25, 2018 at 21:03
  • I meant only regarding votes of content : questions or answers, not votes for users. since sometimes there can more than good answer (programming is an excellent example), if the answer was good: fulfilled the objective of the question, efficiently, then I upvoted it
    – Guy L
    Sep 25, 2018 at 21:11
  • A user you voted may have hit the rep cap, so that user may have only earned part or none of the rep normally awarded from such a vote.
    – Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
    Sep 25, 2018 at 22:57
  • Accepting an answer gives you +2 but it gives them +15. But approving someone's suggested edit (on your post or elsewhere) would give +2.
    – Troyen
    Sep 25, 2018 at 23:51

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