Why do (top) users on this site have such high reputations?

Question

This is something that I've found vaguely weird about this site for some time: the reputations of top users are insanely high here. Today I got curious and went to other big sites on the network, and this site does feel anomalous: the top users on Super User and Server Fault would make 7th and 13th here, despite both sites being rather older and with a higher turnover in terms of questions per day. On sites with a similar age and questions-per-day turnover as Tex.SE such as Physics and Electrical Engineering, the top two rows of users have much less reputation than here. You have to go to Mathematics to find something comparable, among sites with a similar age, but they're churning through something like seven times as many questions as here.

Of course, it's quite possible that in terms of total amounts of reputation things are a bit more in line, but there I don't quite have the statistics chops to make a meaningful comparison. Either way, TeX.SE must either have (a) much more rep (hence also votes) to go around as other comparable sites, or (b) a much more skewed rep distribution curve. This query sort of vaguely supports the latter but then again you'd have to be quite careful with your comparisons.

For now, though, I want to ask this community what you think this says about this site. Does this strike you as a reasonable observation? What would you attribute it to?

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Edit:

There's a strong emphasis in the responses on the total number of votes, and I don't think I quite buy it. It is very easy to query for the total upvotes and downvotes in a site, and the data isn't at all unambiguous. For the comparisons above, it currently looks like this:

        TeX.SE   Super User   Server Fault   Physics        EE    Mathematics
  ↑  1,440,460    1,964,282      1,261,362   575,663   466,268      3,511,289
  ↓     17,360      254,889        168,570    91,254    78,871        380,931

From this, there's a few points worth emphasizing:

• Compared to sites equivalent in age and current turnover, Physics and Electrical Engineering, TeX.SE does have way more upvotes around.
• Similarly, the downvote count does seem rather low compared to everyone else.
• However, SuperUser has a lot less rep on the top pages than TeX.SE... but it still has sizably more upvotes in the database.
• The site with a comparable leaderboard, Mathematics, has more than twice the total rep.
• While SU and SF do have more downvotes than TeX.SE, the negative effect of downvotes on rep is 1/5^th of an upvote, and the count of (upvotes - 0.2 downvotes) for SU is still higher than the total upvotes of TeX.SE.
• That means that explanations along the lines of "we don't downvote" that don't address that ratio have rather low explanatory power.

For me, that says that there also needs to be more concentration of rep on the top tiers, which ties in with (and provides evidence for) Should high-rep users hang back a little?.

Also, just to be clear,

• Yes, rep is just fake internet points and ultimately doesn't matter. However, metrics like these do carry a nontrivial amount of information about each community and they are a reflection of the informal culture in the group.
• Along similar lines, most of the comments saying 'it doesn't matter' and the like seem to come mostly from people whose experience on the SE network is here or on StackOverflow, and who may not be in a position to see just how crazy-high that rep board looks like. Trust me - it's anomalously high, and very much so. Hence this question.

Answer 1

Several reasons:

1. We vote a lot, and we vote up.

2. We have a narrow scope, which means there are people who can answer almost any question.

3. For some people, TeX and friends is almost a religion which they practise through this website.

4. Oh and I forgot to say: We vote a lot.

That's it I think.

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PS: Did I mention that we vote a lot?

Answer 2

1. As Tom and David mentioned in the comments, we just upvote. Even if one feels the urge to downvote a question or an answer, we encourage different approaches, like leaving a comment to help make the content better or point crass errors, or simply do not upvote the content at all (but still pointing what is going on). A question or answer that shows effort always deserves an upvote. And even in the rare cases where a question or an answer gets a downvote, we never ever downvote it below the score of -1. It's quite difficult to recover from mass negative score, so if we act like this, we kill all the chances of the user to coming back to track and fix the content.

2. We have a voting squad. Good questions and answers deserve attention and appraisal. Sometimes, due to some unexpected traffic on the front page, we lose good threads, so there's a team to point out such questions and answers in order to give them the attention they deserve. We want every user in here to feel welcome.

3. When upvoting good answers, the threads get off the list of unanswered threads in this site, so upvoting good content also helps the janitorial work. There's even a monthly session to discuss unanswered questions in order to provide answers or upvote content.

4. I was the top voter of the entire StackExchange universe, so I am partially culprit for serial upvoting lots and lots of questions and answers in here. I had to refrain from voting because I was causing a lot of headaches to my friends's reputations (as the StackExchange serial voting detection algorithm was going bonkers with my voting pattern). I might even consider going back to the game and start giving these StackExchange blokes a good run for their money.

Addendum: I think the most important bit when talking about high users and reputation here at TeX.sx is: we do not care about reputation. Clearly, reputation gives us some sort of helpful tools in order to keep the site clean and under control, but we do not care about numbers. We even make recurring jokes in the chatroom about reputation and how fond we are about palindromic occurrences. Also, my credit card. Reputation does not reflect much in here, we only like to have fun with !!/battle once in a while. The point is: we want to make everybody feel welcome, so we do not "punish" bad content, we encourage learning and improvement over time, through self-discovery and a warm poking from this friendly community.

And cfr is absolutely right: everything is explained by ducks. Quack! :)

Answer 3

A more 'technical' type of answer:

One reason is just that the top users are deeply involved in the development of (La)TeX core itself or very prolific in package writing. This naturally enables them to answer 'any' question on TeX related topics and get the upvotes and reputation by a corresponding accept.

Concerning other programming languages etc. I doubt that there are many core developers active on SE.

Edit(1): Although I have a rather high reputation meanwhile by myself I don't regard myself as a top user on TeX.SX of course. I am only a LaTeX user that develops packages (with limited usability ;-)) and use LaTeX to create my worksheets to teach Math and Physics.

Edit(2): cfr is of course right with her statement that a package author can provide a single, very popular package, that enables him/her to answer many related questions and getting a high reputation count. I used the term 'prolific' to include this cases as well - the author contributes by maintenance, documentation of a single package as well, in this case he/she is prolific as well.

Other refer to the 'We vote much' attitude of this SE site, so I don't have to repeat that. But the voting system is a little bit biased, in my point of view.

Edit (3): I just wanted to add that although I have some high reputation by now this was just by kind upvoting of many more kind users and by reading their posts (and answers). I was a skilled LaTeX end user before coming to TeX.SX, but I learned so much here in about 3 years compared to 15 years of LaTeX usage before.

Edit (4): We have some strange downvoters here as well

Answer 4

Mae hwyaden TeX SE yn pleidleisio'n aml iawn.

Esbonnir popeth gan hwyaid.

Gerald_G, Rubber Duck Family

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TeX SE's duck votes frequently.

Everything is explained by ducks.

Answer 5

I upvote. A lot. People vote for my answers, so I have to vote.

It's rare I don't upvote a question I answer to: as one of the moderators once told me, “if you deem a question worthy answering, then it's also worth a vote”.

I also vote answers: when they solve a problem in a “good way”, I think they deserve a vote. What a “good way” is probably depends on my approach to TeX/LaTeX; if I see an answer written the way I'd write it, it's obvious upvoting it. I always vote for answerers who show skills I don't have (the TikZ area, in particular).

Am I wrong? I don't think so. Leaving a good answer at zero score just because the OP accepted another one is silly. Even a not so good one, but which could be improved (I also add a comment, of course).

I rarely downvote: some cases do need a downvote, because the answer is blatantly wrong or the question is very ill-posed. But I always leave a comment about the downvote. Most often the downvoted answer gets removed, because the OP realizes his/her error, or fixed.

Is reputation something really important? Not so much, so long as mine is larger than David's. I'm heading to 500K (expected by the end of August 2016) and of course I am grateful to all the people who rewarded my efforts for helping them, but my real aim is just helping people by sharing my skills and trying to teach how to better use TeX.

Answer 6

In addition to some of the observations that we vote a lot, I think there's another reason why that voting occurs: we value substantial answers over short one liners, and we tend to comment on answers to make them better rather than post a competing answer which is minimally similar to an existing one. See also Why do people answer in comments?.

The end result of these two practices is that we have a lot of very high quality answers, and a relatively small number of answers per question. But when there are multiple answers, they are usually distinct in ways that all of the answers get some degree of upvoting.

Oh, and we vote. A lot.

Answer 7

Yes, we do vote a lot, but I think it's much more than that.

This community is very positive. We don't compete against each other (except perhaps playfully when we comment along the lines of "you beat me to the answer by 2 seconds"). We share our ideas freely. We encourage people: in how to get a solution that works for them, in how to write better code, etc. And, I think that makes all the difference.

I can't say how often I am shocked when I go to other sites and I see how nasty, negative, and condescending people can be, and how utterly lacking in sympathy for the individual struggling to learn and understand. After a while, I don't want to participate in those groups. And so I stop voting in those groups too.

There was a period of time when I contributed almost on a daily basis. I always appreciated the feedback I got. I don't think I can remember even once when I got a disparaging remark, though there've been a few times I've revisited old questions or answers of mine and wished I could bury my head in the sand out of shame. Yet the comments are generally very supportive, sometimes even full of praise.

Currently, I've just sort of been hovering in the background. My life has taken a turn so I have less time to participate here. And yet, I do come back---if not daily, at least 4 or 5 times a week to see what's going on. And, I continue to vote.

If you build a community that is positive, encouraging, sympathetic, and truly supportive, people will stick around and keep coming back. The more people there are who stick around, the more people there are to upvote.

Answer 8

I haven't been here for a long time, but there's something different about this group, and it's way more than voting so many times.

In general, this community is way more friendly than, for example, Stack Overflow (in my opinion). In fact, by just looking at the questions one can learn more, thus, giving the answers and their authors what they deserve: votes.

Also, here the members encourage you not to just ask and use, but to read the documentation. As this site focus on TeX and friends, and, as I realised, some members actually are the creators of a bunch of useful packages, it's common that some questions are solved on their docs. Not directly, but that helps a lot!

I think this group doesn't focus on just reputation, but to create quality questions and answers. I mean, it'll be way more useful to look up and find interesting approaches in almost no time, than to clean up the "garbarge" before finding something actually useful. That's what I can conclude.

And don't think I'm advanced on this, I'm a beginner using LaTeX, and I've learned a lot since I signed up to here! =P

Answer 9

Whenever I google a LaTeX issue, I end up on tex.SE. Now, that may have to do with my filter bubble, but it's also the best resources for LaTeX-related trouble, no questions asked.

So I routinely get here, find good stuff, and then of course upvote it. I can only hope that this happens to many people, i.e. they land here, get help, and already have the account to vote (because you had to ask that one question, anyway).

Compared to other sites, programming questions lend themselves better to google and it's often easy to identify working answers quickly.

Compare that to, say, cs.SE (my main site): questions are inherently hard to google (many contain mathematics) and you have to read, digest, and understand most answers before you figure out whether it helps you towards your ultimate goals. So it is plausible to me that we may get fewer drive-by voters on most questions than you do here; for us, it's probably mostly a few core users and the OPs doing the voting.
(This seems to be a claim that's easy to investigate with the data explorer -- not today.)

Answer 10

I expect to get grilled for this answer, but nevertheless I'd like to present this here. I have not much experience and I can only compare two communities: physics and LaTeX. I believe that I understand physics much better than LaTeX, and, frankly better than those I had the "pleasure" to interact on the physics site. The upshot is that top users on this site know what they are doing, after all they include many of those who actively develop LaTeX. So I think users like egreg, David, cfr, percusse, Christian Feuersänger, Martin Scharrer Torbjørn T. and many others deserve every vote they got. Among the physics site it is hard to find a top physicist. Of course, there are some very good ones, but no leaders of the field (as far as I can see). Hence the quality of the posts is also not as good as it might be, which also gets reflected by the votes.

A more practical reason is that on this site you can very easily check if an answer works. Compile it and it either works or it doesn't. On the physics site, there are several answers that are simply wrong, but it is not as straightforward to disprove an answer.

Again, the upshot is that here some of the top users are leaders of the field, which is not the case at least in some of the other communities. So it is not surprising that they get more votes.

Answer 11

Had they had been voting as much as we did then it would be an anomaly. We can easily cover their two pages with our very same top rows, compare them too:

SU voters:

SF voters:

Again, on behalf of a few other users, I vote for "mark as read" almost always. Because as mentioned, we don't care about the votes except those two misters you know who

Answer 12

A few factors I don't think have been mentioned above:

• There's often more than one right way to do things, or a best way and a most suitable way. This can lead to multiple highly-voted answers for a given question. A simple example: How do I draw...? with a tikz and a pstricks answer. My limited experience of SO is that this is less often the case (though at SU and unix this may happen again).

• SO is huge. Although it has more questions per day, it doesn't necessarily have more questions for a given user's experience. And questions drop off the bottom of the homepage quite quickly, meaning that votes from the casual user thinking "that's interesting" and upvoting the question, and answer or both are time limited. This also applies to SU.

• Because SO is busier and broader, I tend to arrive from google, rather than visiting the homepage regularly. So I miss out on interesting questions and the chance to vote. Again, this is true on SU as well.

Answer 13

Upvoting is free, upvoting is fun. There are many different reasons to upvote a question or answer.

Oh interesting question, upvote.

Oh, somebody posted an answer to my question, upvote.

Or as a high and welcome, leave a positive vote.

Or you think: Oh, nice answer. Leave an upvote.

Or you think? How fast is this man typing? Does egreg have a chip in his brain directly sending his thoughts to the Your Answer interface? He types an answer faster than i can read the question. Leave an upvote.

Oh somebody posted an alternative solution. Upvote.

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I have to wait 8 hours till i can vote again. I used up all my 40 possible votes.

Upvoting is very easy.

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On the other hand, we are lazy downvoters. Before a downvote is done, usually two or three comments are left with suggestions for improvement.

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For now, though, I want to ask this community what you think this says about this site. Does this strike you as a reasonable observation? What would you attribute it to?

Nobody races other users, nobody wants to reach a certain treshold before XYZ reaches it. So we upvote each other.

I am really not surprised.

Answer 14

I think it has been said numerous times now, that we like to upvote.

I am not active on the other mentioned SE places, but i would bet they don't have the users that contribute by giving good answers, getting reputation points and give them away later with the help of bounties.
One user gave 60k away just doing this. Those 60k gotta be somewhere, most likely with the most active and busy people, the people with the highest rep.

A more detailed list can be found with the help of the Stack Exchange Data Explorer.