what % of upvotes come from the highest reputation point users

Question

robs question got me thinking..

For a given time period, of the non-solution-awarded upvotes made, how many come from the users with the highest (say, top 100) SFSE users?

That is, do most of the upvotes come from SFSE's "council of elders" (guild members, as it were)? Or are the upvotes coming from "the masses"?

I would hypothesize, that for recent questions/answers, the upvotes come from the active community members but over time, the upvotes come from the masses as folks do searches to look for help.

At our org, we have several Salesforce devs/admins and I'm the only one who has enough rep points to upvote. The others can't be bothered to post questions (or answer) to even earn enough reputation. If I point them to an answer that solves their issue and suggest they upvote it, they have no impact. I suspect there are tens of thousands like them worldwide. Thus, by inference, of the SFSE user base, are the primary upvoters the heaviest contributors?

I too, like sfdcfox have found when searching SFSE that an answer of my own (long forgotten by me) solves my issue! And whenever I search and see a question or answer that is credible in any way, I'll upvote it

Answer 1

I ran the query, and it looks like the top 100 users by reputation make up just under half of the total up votes:

Total up votes

SELECT sum( up_vote_count ) 
FROM user
;

sum( up_vote_count )
--------------------
317729

Up votes by top 100 users

SELECT sum( up_vote_count ) 
FROM (
    SELECT reputation, up_vote_count
    FROM user
    ORDER BY reputation DESC
    LIMIT 100
) AS top_users
;

sum( up_vote_count )
--------------------
157483

---

That being said, there's a good amount of variation between individual users.

Some people with low reputation vote a lot:

Low rep, lots of up votes

SELECT reputation , up_vote_count 
FROM user 
WHERE reputation < 500 
  AND up_vote_count > 500 ;

reputation  up_vote_count
----------  -------------
110         678          
152         734          
161         2136         
162         622          
113         724          
476         590

And some people with high reputation hardly vote at all:

High rep, not so many up votes

SELECT reputation , up_vote_count 
FROM user 
WHERE reputation > 5000 
  AND up_vote_count < 50 ;

reputation  up_vote_count
----------  -------------
9444        23           
9169        22           
5791        31           
5874        11

Answer 2

You can readily look at how many votes a user has cast on SFSE by going to Users then clicking on voters. As someone who's very high on that list, I've always found it interesting to see the distribution of where others stand who have high vs medium and low reputations in our community. The person right below me on that list has about 1/6th of what I do in reputation. I think that says a LOT about his interest in this forum.

There are others who have quite high amounts of reputation that are much lower down in the rankings for voting. There are more than a few with 15k or more of reputation that don't appear until the 3rd and 4th page. What impresses me is the number of users with 1.5k or less that appear on the 1st and 2nd page!

I think in general, your hypothesis is correct that up votes come from the "council of elders", but those elders may not all have high reputations. Many of the names on that voter list I recognize as being long time members of this community for having asked questions, but not necessarily for having answered posts that received up votes. That may be the difference that you've not taken into account in whom you've included in your list of "elders".

I do agree though that over time, we see our answers voted up on a regular basis as they're viewed by users who have sufficient reputation to do so. I know it happens to me on a regular basis, quite often on answers that I don't even remember having written. I sometimes find my own answers when I'm searching for something. Its nice to have them cataloged for my use when needed. :-)

EDIT

I've corrected the links to go to the main SF.SE Users instead of to Meta. My original comments were based on viewing the meta links. In looking at the main site, the results are remarkably similar which to me says a lot. My apologies for the original error in my post.