Santa is frequently found in The 2nd Monitor. Santa can do magic, and sprinkle upvotes to all the boys and girls that have been good reviewers this year.
Santa generates quite a bunch of reputation points on the site, we like Santa.
However Santa is fraying with a thin line between legit and suspicious voting schemes prone to vote reversal, and can earn a user 20, 30, 40, or even 50 points by browsing a user's recent answers and finding well-written answers that weren't already upvoted.
I've worn Santa's hat quite often myself, and then a recent comment in chat that linked to the weekly user reputation rankings made me wonder.
We have many users (>40K), but ~25% (10,653, avg.score 149.16) have visited the site in the last 60 days, 14.78% (1,574, avg.score 602.24) of which were avid users (>150pts).
Roughly 9,5K answer votes and 7.2K question votes (16,673 votes) were spent in that timeframe, by roughly 150-160 voters, generating roughly 130,000 points on the site. Santa's actual impact on the big picture is marginal, it's like a drop in the ocean. Or is it? It does seem to somewhat skew some rankings.
But that leaves over 1,300 (83%) avid users that didn't vote, and 10,500 (a whopping 98.6%) active users that haven't spent a vote either.
If only a fraction of these users spent some of their votes, whether Santa exists or not wouldn't make a difference. But...
[♠] People. Still. Don't. Vote. Enough. [♠]
So. Should we kill Santa? Is Santa being a good thing for CR?
