originally, in the
zephyr system at
CMU it meant adding one point to a reputation.
Later someone coded a '
bot to actually keep track of the plusplussing (and of course of the minusminusing), and the bot could be queried, leading to ego boosts or great
bitterness (this
might sound familiar ...).
I propose this for defining the act of voting up a writeup, because you don't know its reputation before voting. It is a bit like doing, in your programming language of choice,
snarple->reputation++;
in a somewhat blind fashion.