> Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those thousands of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these answers from google

> Surely there must be a way to capture the value-added for all those thousands of people in the reputation system? Many people get to these answers from google, so it sounds like a simple matter of pinging them to (sign-in) and upvote the answer that helped them out. This happens if you're already logged-in and got to the site through a Google search (although only under certain circumstances—I think you have to have not visited SO in the past few hours/days?) > If, on the other hand, as the author says SO is no longer actually values reputation, and is screwing with their algorithms accordingly, that is a serious problem. Not sure what can be done about that. The only changes to the reputation system that I can think of are: - Making question upvotes worth +5 instead of +10 (March 2010: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-...) - Making answers on downvotes free (June 2011: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-...) Beyond that, you can now gain rep from suggesting edits (+2, max +1000 from suggested edits or when you gain editing privileges), but that's not a change so much as an addition to the system.