Where did the rep disappear?

Question

I'm new to this site, so I was just browsing through some of the most up-voted questions. I came across this particular question and noticed something strange.

The question has 640 up-votes today. On all SE sites, one question up-vote equals 5 points, so the user should have above 3.2k rep. But @Diessika has only 2371 rep right now. I assumed that the user must have got into trouble on SE and lost his rep, but then I saw something else.

The first answer has 1133 up-votes right now, and this should amount to about 11330 rep, isn't it? But @jnmnrd has only 5.7k rep right now.

Is there some kind of limit on how much rep you can earn out of a single question?

Answer 1

Reputation is limited to 200 points per day (except for things like awarded bounties and other exceptions), so once you get 40 votes in one day (20 for an answer) you hit your rep limit. More votes that day don't equal more points.

With big questions like that they tend to get a lot of votes over a few days, so the asker will hit their rep limit several times in a row. Then the votes come in in dribs-and-drabs over time.

You can continuously earn reputation on one question / answer forever. But you can only get 200 rep per day overall.

The reason for this is primarily so that one person doesn't get a massive reputation score off the back of one really popular question. We want the reputation to be based more on their general contribution to the site overall. High rep should mean that that user has a lot of good knowledge and has been helpful to many people. One single post may get loads of views and votes but not necessarily equate to how valuable / knowledgeable that user is overall.