Forgive me because I'm still unclear on how things work on SE, and this is a point that I may just be confused about. But it seems that when a question or answer gets an upvote on Politics.SE, I get a little green "+10" badge (that makes me feel good about myself.) But when a question or answer on another board gets an upvote, I only get a "+5" (which makes me feel good about myself but slightly less so.)
Is the +10 per upvote a thing specific to Politics.SE or is some other mechanic at work?
You may be mistaken. A user receives +5 rep when their question is upvoted and +10 when their answer is upvoted.
This is true here on Politics.SE (see our tour) as well as other sites, such as SciFi.SE (their tour).
Additionally, rep is "batched" on the navbar. So you may have +5 rep if some combination of events net out to a +5. For example, maybe you have +10 (from an upvote to your question) but -5 from downvoting others' answers. The navbar will display an alert for the net change of +5 rep.
Originally questions gave +10 as well, but that was changed for SO (pre-SE network) in 2010
In other words, we’re rebalancing a bit to favor answers.
So you're not getting more rep for answers, you're getting less for questions. More a philosophy than anything
