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What does your reputation mean to you?
Enlighten me, my fellow digital sharecroppers, what's the point of all these reputation points?
Other than being able to proffer the good deed number points on bounty questions, I am unable to see any other benefits.
It's good for satisfaction of your own ego.
UPDATE: 2.5 years later I can confirm you get no benefit from your reputation points whatsoever. You're better off building rep on any freelancer site out there.
A higher reputation means the site trusts you more - so it will let you edit posts, vote to close questions etc. See the FAQ for details.
Oh, and it's fun too.
At 200k rep you get a free pony
It encourages participation by assigning each person a relatively meaningless number. Due to human (male geek) psychology, this number is automatically associated with self-worth, bigger numbers being necessarily better. Competitive behavior then ensues as members vie for the biggest rep number.
For some individuals this process is more conscious and deliberate than for others. Nevertheless, it is fantastically successful at getting people to participate, and to do so in a manner which will accumulate reputation points.
Apart from the obvious 'ego' answer, maybe your future employer is impressed. See http://careers.stackoverflow.com/ and http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/02.html
The reputation is a measure of how useful you've been by answering or by asking questions as a sum.
But there are many caveats, answering general questions that have a large audience will yield you more rep than answering niche questions, therefore reputation is not an indication of how broad your knowledge is.
Answering highly technical or technology specific questions will yield you less reputation, therefore reputation can't measure how deep or advanced your knowledge is.
Also there are reputation caps to consider.
Therefore reputation is simply a crude measure of activity on the site combined with how much the community appreciates your answers.
Also my definition simply is: "a number that people like to watch how it grows".
Some companies look at the Rep on SO and offer promotions etc. They see it as a way of figuring out who is interested in technology and target those people to try and get them to use their products.
When Jeff and Joel luck out and sell Stack Overflow to Google for $$$WONGA then we'll all be sent the monetary equivalent of our reputation.
You can trade reputation for upgrades. For my next two I'm getting Action Boy and telescopic vision.
