Ok...who's the little sh** head who keeps downvoting my posts‽..🧐

@ElwoodBlues See I was thinking that is how it worked.

Kind of like the school or workplace snitches, eventually they are not even listened to and draw bad attention to themselves.

@CestManan I strongly suspect that social sites like this maintain a top-secret hidden internal "reputation" score for each user. But this is just me thinking aloud and guessing. I've never seen a single line of SW source code. Of course a rep score has to be hidden and secret otherwise people would try to game the system. Downvotes are just one more variable to feed into the reputation score, both the source and the target of the downvote. Anyway, responses, comments, votes up or down, from high rep users have more weight. If you have a good rep, get good responses to your posts & comments, get upvotes, etc then you should have nothing to worry about. If you don't have a good rep yet, say if you're a brand new account trying to damage someone's established account, well then you can't do much damage because you have minimal rep. Things like rep algorithms allow the site to run more automatically so the admins can address weightier concerns. Like getting SW pages a better rank for google searches!

@ElwoodBlues You might be right. How would a brand new account even know other users if it were not the same person from an old account.

[quote] Like getting SW pages a better rank for google searches![/quote]

I would think though that if SW thinks it is going to be as big as FB or the other huge platforms, it is merely wishful thinking.

This, like most forums, is a niche site.

@CestManan True. I was just drawing an analogy between Google page rank and user reputation value. But on the financial side, Andrew & Nuno make money from showing ads to eyeballs, so if Google can bring more eyeballs here, that's positive cash flow.

@ElwoodBlues It does make sense.