There’s another way to interpret the rep voting. I vote for people who I’m friends with and want to support. Some of them joined when I joined and we became friends over time. Humans often clump together in similar economic and intellectual circles. The fact that they vote according to those same patterns doesn’t surprise me. The reputation system isn’t that great, but I do often find a correlation between the quality of the comment or post with the reputation score and that makes sense if more people with stake in the system voted them to give them that score.