[caturopath]

I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.

[jrockway]

Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.

[caturopath]

Yeah, the continued upvotes for the same old questions doesn't surprise me, doubly so given the nasty culture of trying your best to close all new questions. Today, if someone posts a question, it will be closed as a duplicate (whether or not it actually is), or as too broad or too narrow. My main SO contribution in the last several years has been votes to re-open, which don't tend to get enough to actually re-open.

My real surprise isn't the continued flow of points, just the apparent stasis. I could imagine being at 0.003% by now, for instance, from this phenomenon.

[geerlingguy]

Some of my oldest answers have hundreds of votes and required minimal effort to answer well... some of the newer answers have less than ten votes, since they're much more niche (even if they take 10x the effort to answer well).

A lot of the early broad answers got those huge upvote counts and make the early users who answered them stay in the top percentiles.

[iSnow]

There really should be some karma decay system to prevent early users hogging 5-figure reputation. I didn't do much there in the last 5y but I am still way up in reputation.

[mark-r]

I don't see how you can call it "hogging". Having a high reputation doesn't prevent anyone else from getting a high reputation too.

For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.

[iSnow]

SO had quite some toxic moderators who came in early and dominated everything because of their 5-fig karma. It drove me away from helping out there.

[Ekaros]

Gradual 5 year drop-off for effective karma might do community good. As such any post older than that would have zero effective karma, but you could still show historic karma. Maybe this would make moderation better for new users as old hostile ones lose their power if they don't keep participating in the same pit as rest new userbase...

[jagger27]

I think this idea combined with the “is this answer still relevant” flag that was recently added would work well. I see no reason to devalue old but still good answers.

[mark-r]

Sometimes you're forced to work with older technology, and it's nice that you can still find answers to questions that many would consider obsolete. I'd hate to see a clean-up effort that makes that information go away forever.

[chrismorgan]

Same. “Top N%” looks to just use score, and momentum on old answers is a big deal. I’m top 0.24%, with my score having increased by about 50% (25,000) in the last 3½ years (as far as their little chart shows), overwhelmingly because of momentum on old answers from 2010–2015—for during that time I’ve only made a handful of edits, three question, and six answers, three of which were for my own three questions.