The idea of counting references to articles is fairly widespread in the scientific and engineering communities; a big chunk of "reputation" is how many other workers reference your articles. See, for example, Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks.

Frequency of citation is similar to, but not identical with, popularity. As an example, I would guess that no matter how many upvotes a responses in a poll, regardless of how many upvotes they get, are probably not the targets of many links.