Reputation on Social Networks

Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility — Image via Wikipedia

Classical Economics talks of the value of utlity, diminishing marginal utility if the same things is repeated again and again (like spam in an online community)

StackOverflow has a great way of measuring reputation – and thus allows intangible benefits /awards -similar to wikipedia badges , reddit karma. Utility is also auto generated like @klout on twitter or lists memberships and other sucessful open source communities online including Ubuntu forums have ways to create ah hierarchies even in class less utopian classes.

Basically it then acts as the motivating game as the mostly boy population try to race on numbers.

in Stack Overflow- you can get buddies to upvote you and basically act as a role playing game too.

—–From http://stackoverflow.com/faq#reputation

To gain reputation, post good questions and useful answers. Your peers will vote on your posts, and those votes will cause you to gain (or, in rare cases, lose) reputation:

answer is voted up	+10
question is voted up	+5
answer is accepted	+15	(+2 to acceptor)
post is voted down	-2	(-1 to voter)

A maximum of 30 votes can be cast per user per day, and you can earn a maximum of 200 reputation per day (although accepted answers and bounty awards are immune to this limit). Also, please note that votes for any posts marked “community wiki” do not generate reputation.

Amass enough reputation points and Stack Overflow will allow you to go beyond simply asking and answering questions: