1
$\begingroup$

I see that some of my questions and answers have a positive and negative integer score. Where does this score come from?

I am new on this site.

$\endgroup$
2
  • 6
    $\begingroup$ Welcome! You might take the tour. $\endgroup$
    – rob Mod
    Commented Apr 26, 2020 at 21:10
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ By the way, votes here on Physics meta do not affect your reputation score. $\endgroup$
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented Apr 27, 2020 at 5:53

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4
$\begingroup$

Other members of the site are upvoting (“liking”) or downvoting (“disliking”) your questions and answers. That is what the grey up and down triangles are for. The integer between them is the net vote.

This is the community’s feedback to you on the quality and appropriateness of your question or answer, and it determines your overall reputation, which currently is 11. You can see how the upvotes and downvotes affect your reputation by going to your profile, selecting the Activity page, and looking at the Reputation subpage. Upvotes contribute +10 to your reputation but downvotes only -2.

$\endgroup$
1
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ It's important that people don't take downvotes (or upvotes) too personally. Question & answer scores are partly a signal for the post author, but mostly they are a signal about the value of the post for all the future readers. $\endgroup$
    – PM 2Ring
    Commented Apr 27, 2020 at 5:56
1
$\begingroup$

If you're a new user, the vote system might be unintuitive because you aren't able to participate yet. It should make more sense once the website allows you to participate in voting.

As you gain reputation, you can earn privileges.

  • At 15 rep, you can cast up-votes.
    Up-voting a question, answer, or comment increases its score by 1.

  • At 125 rep, you can cast down-votes.
    Down-voting a question or answer decreases its score by 1. Comments can't be down-voted, so their scores are always non-negative.

  • At 1000 rep, you can see up-votes vs. down-votes.
    Normally scores are just a single integer. Once you get this ability, you can click to see how many up-votes and down-votes went into the score. For example, if a question has a score of 5, you can see that it has 7 up-votes and 2 down-votes.

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.