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From my experience, it's fairly easy to earn 200 reputation a day on Stack Overflow if you write a few decent answers. Meanwhile, it's incomprehensibly hard to earn 200 rep on Android Enthusiasts a day, even if you write 200 great answers.

I'd like to find out on which site it's easier to earn reputation. For example, comparing reputation leagues across sites could be a good method, but there's no easy way to do so (except writing a program that fetches all leagues and parses them), is it?

FWIW, the highest reputation on a single site is undoubtably Jon Skeet on SO. The second highest appears to have gone to egreg on TeX - LaTeX.

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    Reputation on its own is pretty meaningless. Its pretty much an arbitrary number on its own – Journeyman Geek♦ Jan 12 at 13:48
  • That probably depends on the popularity of the site. – πάντα ῥεῖ Jan 12 at 14:13
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    Depends upon in which thing you are interested. – Swapnil Jan 12 at 15:34
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    How much reps you gain with your answers depends a lot on the popularity of the tags attached to that question. – Christophe Strobbe Jan 12 at 17:09
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    The user base is undoubtedly very relevant in how much rep one can get. Also answering many questions in a way that's deemed good by the community is obviously relevant. – egreg Jan 12 at 17:55
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    Comparing different sites can be misleading; for instance, my average rep per answer is about 40.5; Jon Skeet's is 31.2; the second highest rep user on SO has an average of 49.5. – egreg Jan 12 at 18:01
  • Related: Six simple tips to get Stack Overflow reputation fast – Peter Mortensen Jan 12 at 20:18
  • I don't think egreg has the second highest reputation on SE. See here for example. – pizza static void main Jan 13 at 4:34
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    @pizzastaticvoidmain I think that the question wasn't trying to say that egreg's is the second highest. The point is that out of all sites, the one where the highest rep person has the most rep is SO, with Jon Skeet. The second one is Tex-Latex. So no other site reputation leader has more than egreg, other than Jon Skeet. – Chair Jan 13 at 4:49
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Don't bother too much about what is called reputation on SE sites (as in this comment below your question). Instead, I'd rather use an approach like so to decide about the SE sites you want to be participating in, to start answering questions (or post your own questions):

  • Create a list of some SE sites that are about topics that you're interested in, say about 5 to 10 sites.
  • Start lurking a bit to see the kind of questions / answers coming up. Eliminate those SE sites from your list for which you discover the questions being asked are not that interesting to you. Try to reduce your list to say about 3 to 5 SE sites (your shortlist).
  • For each of your SE sites on your shortlist, do some research by investigating some (up to 10 or so?) of its tags, to get an idea about:
    • the kind of questions being asked (related to the tags you selected).
    • the "top users" for each of those tags.
    • the "unanswered" questions for each of those tags.
  • Pick a few tags (from those you investigated), and start answering questions (unanswered or even those which already have an accepted answer).
  • Give it some time to see how those answers are perceived, especially related to:
    • the kind of comments they get.
    • their votes and/or the accepts.
    • the badges you earn from them.
  • At any time, you can always adapt the above approach, either by adapting your shortlist of SE sites, and/or the list of tags you have decided about.

If you want to see a real world illustration of the above (=the results I got over the past few years using the above approach), then go checkout these links (all from on Drupal.SE):

And even though I think my location in the overall (what SE calls) Reputation ranking is not that bad, for me the best illustration of somebody's real reputation is reflected in the tags they appear to be involved in, and/or the badges they earned.

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