One node of mine has a reputation of 6 right now. Another has a reputation of 14. One has a reputation of 39 and another 81.

What can you learn from that?

By focusing on the particular value of a node's reputation, you can answer only one question: what is the current value of upvotes minus downvotes for this particular node? You cannot answer several other statistically relevant questions such as:

• What is the total number of people who voted on this node?
• What is the total number of people who read this node?
• What is the total number of people who would have voted on this node if they had sufficient votes to do so?
• How many votes did this node receive in comparison to other nodes today?
• How many votes will this node receive in the future?
• What is the average daily distribution of votes by time?
• What is the current reputation of this node in comparison to all other nodes in this thread, of the day, and in the system altogether?
• What is the current maximum or minimum possible value for this node?

There are likely many other important questions. Looking at even that minimal list, it's easy for me to say that the single numeric reputation of any single node is exceedingly useless. You're welcome to intuit some shade of meaning from that number, but that single number is admirably short of any sort of context that can put it into a statistically relevant and analyzable setting.

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