Just a curiosity. I have often found users' profiles to be very helpful, or otherwise interesting. I also have often felt the need to +1 a person rather than a question/answer, just because they are particularly helpful.
Advantages/disadvantages to doing this? Would this make the reputation gap too high for "bigtime" users who get 10k+ profile views?
No, there should not. Stack Overflow isn't about the people, it's about the content. Upvote the helpful answers, and that increases the user's rep. Being able to upvote a person independently of their content wouldn't be useful.
Apart from the discussion on people vs. content, the point here is, what will be the use of the +1 (or, -1)?
In an answer, the upvote (+1) is a sign of acceptance of the same which reflects the usefulness and realibility of a particular answer / approach. OTOH, the downvote (-1) denotes the low-quality or wrong answers.
What is the significance of voting on a profile, in that context? What is right or wrong in a profile? If there is a link to a very useful content, the right place of that content is into a self Q&A wiki-style post, IMHO.
Note: If it's about the popularity of a particular user, you always have the "IMPACT" and "Profile Views" tab.
