@Charlie Brumbaugh raised this question on Chat a few days ago. He tallied a recent loss of upvotes involving 15 users losing a total of 3,379 votes. To that add another user (me) losing 205 upvotes yesterday.
The tally as of this posting is 16 users losing a total of 3,584 upvotes, or a average of 224 upvotes per user.
Moreover, I lost 75 upvotes on English Language and Usage yesterday.
My losses were listed as User Removed, which is a valid reason for losing a few upvotes, but not an average of 224 upvotes over 16 users. Something is off! When a high-rep user closes his account, there is an adjustment in assigning votes lost because of "user removed".
As is says under Learn More after the User Removed explanation:
This removal occurs whenever a user is deleted, unless that user had a very high reputation score. Because high-reputation users have usually cast a great many votes, removing all of them could be that much more disruptive to other users. In such cases, the staff use a special deletion that preserves the votes, resulting in no reputation change for those who had been voted on by that user.
Is this adjustment broken? Has malware crept in? Has a hacker infiltrated?
It is time to take this seriously and get to the bottom of this widespread anomaly, and correct it if at all possible.
I agree with those who say that rep points are of no real value and should be followed by i, for imaginary. However imaginary numbers have real impact in many fields, and in the case of SE, we have all worked for our rep points, and even though we had fun doing it, this still feels like a burglary.
