Too much of the wrong kind of fun.

The point, from the FAQ is to answer programming questions with people who a trusted by their peers.

Go to the Python tag to join that conversation.

Your reputation is your overall score. Every time your question (or answer) is voted up, you get 10 reputation points. Each time you're voted down you lose 2.

There are folks with reputations over 7,000 points. That's a lot up votes on good answers. These are people who must be pretty good to be so well respected.

Plus, for fun, they also hand out badges for odd milestones. See the badges pages for some cool kinds of paths you can follow.

Finally, governance-wise, they allocate certain privileges based on your reputation. For instance, I've finally reached the point where I'm allowed to edit posts that are marked as part of the community wiki and retag other questions to put them in better categories. Me and about 500 other people who have pretty good reputations.

It's fun. I've learned a lot about the Python shlex module, amongst other juicy tidbits.