Quote Originally Posted by worldofneil View Post
The left side is "kin", which is probably the "likes" that have been mentioned already. People can have 0, 1, 2 or even 3 kin. Each one is a separate gold medal. I haven't seen anyone with 4 yet.

I'd like to propose an experiment though to see if we can determine if that's definitely the number of likes you've received?
I'm trying to think in SE logic; something more complicated than it actually has to be, so it might be formulated around number of posts vs likes given/received. There are posters here with two red medals but < 2k posts, and less popular posters such as myself with well over 1k posts but only one or perhaps no 'kin' medals at all. Because of this possibility, I am not sure if your test can pinpoint acquirement of kin based on likes alone. I think we would have to test multiple accounts in order to eliminate other possible algorithms.

Not sure if SE will ever confirm though. Hell, the person who programmed it might not even be around anymore, and the person responsible now won't bother going through lines of code for something that is not broken.