Thanks for the responses (to both threads). Yes, reputation is an important factor to the success of all these platforms; Reddit, Stackoverflow, Imgur, Hacker n

Thanks for the responses (to both threads). Yes, reputation is an important factor to the success of all these platforms; Reddit, Stackoverflow, Imgur, Hacker news.... It gives a quantifiable measure of how much you're helping a community. Without it, members can't see the effects of the contributions they've made, and are probably less likely to continue contributing. I personally believe it's an extremely small minority of people who will contribute to your website for altruistic reasons alone.