[pan69]

I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere.

Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.

[wwweston]

The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road.

There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?)

Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.

[karlkatzke]

One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue.

Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.

When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.

[legooolas]

I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D

[unhammer]

Happens to me all the time. I'm either not automating enough things, or automating too many things.

Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?

[r-bar]

It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

[DougN7]

I’ve had a worse experience - I end up looking for a solution to a problem only to find an unanswered question from years earlier, which was also asked by me back then :(

[sshagent]

I've done this too. Its at the point, i figure there is no solution

[smrtinsert]

If I had an dollar for searching and finding a reddit thread that I created for a question that I eventually had to find the answer to myself since somehow everyone else remembers this, I'd have at least 10 dollars.

Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.

[vijucat]

Hilarious and heart-warming (minus the drinking daily on the job part, of course)!

[sixothree]

I found an answer I had posted a few years prior.

[z3t4]

High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.

[xchaotic]

It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters

[ThomasRedstone]

That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity.

Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).

[khuey]

Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.

[allendoerfer]

Stocks do not need buybacks or dividends. They are rights to control a share of a company, which earns (or potentially earns) money. That’s inherently valuable even without a stock market to determine a price. You control a machine, which makes things and earns money.

Crypto is only valuable, because others think so, too. You control a place inside a distributed list. Others think a place in exactly this list is valuable, while all the other lists are shitcoins.

[xur17]

Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on.

This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.

[shanebrunette]

As a counterpoint, YFI literally buys back it's token from fees earned from users using their automated yield farming strategy. There are plenty of duds around, but that doesn't make everything a dud.

[ekianjo]

Not all stocks have dividends.

[menzoic]

Buybacks are very popular in crypto. Its call token burning. Binance does it all the time with BNB.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.

[vmception]

and being involved with a common question

the more newbish the better

[radlad]

It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.

[dstick]

I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO.

I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%.

My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)

[int_19h]

It's also very much about timing. If you happen to write a popular answer at the time when interest in some particular tech is high for whatever reason, that gets a lot of views and upvotes early on. And once it has those upvotes, people looking for related answers later are more likely to stumble onto it.

I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess, depending on your outlook): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if that answer was written today.

And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using regex to parse HTML.

[thunderrabbit]

I'm chuckling at the idea that you could have possibly misinterpreted that post.

"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"

int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈

/s

[einpoklum]

Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously...

I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.

[kbenson]

You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some.

It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.

[einpoklum]

> it's how useful you are/were to the site

One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.

Who has been more useful to the site?

[kbenson]

> One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

I imagine the person that asked the question about git was the first to ask. There's a benefit to being the first, or asking unique questions. The value of the first time that was asked and answered usefully on SO is vastly greater than the 100th time, and the value of having it at one time compared to a year later is also great. Sometimes what matters is how it's asked, so it looks like other people's questions.

> Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

I would guess those complex and delicate questions didn't help a lot of people, or they would have upvoted, right? Whether that's because people didn't see them or it's so esoteric as to not really help many people, the result is the same.

> Who has been more useful to the site?

The person who asked a question that got a useful answer first, or that answered a question usefully first, is greater.

Stack Overflow would be a pretty shit site if the first time someone answered that git question was in 2021 and not a decade or more ago, so optimizing for people identifying, asking and answering unique questions that match the questions other people have and are easily identified when people search for that problem makes sense IMO.

In the mechanical turk metaphor, you're willing to pay a lot for someone to take out your overflowing smelly trash because that's what you need, but you're not willing to pay as much for someone to do the same thing a day later if it's not even half full and doesn't smell. You reward people more for doing the things you need.

[21bits]

The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.

[einpoklum]

If that person hadn't asked the question, any number of other people would have asked it, probably a couple of days later.

[bhandziuk]

I like their approximate people reached metric. I've answered at lot of VBA questions which get a lot of views but not necessarily from developers who might have an account. I suspect they are mostly anonymous users and thus the answers get a lot of views but relatively few votes.

[caf]

I've looked at the 'people reached' metric and wondered: does this mean that, objectively speaking, the greatest impact I'll have on the world will turn out to have been a few stackoverflow answers?

[owl57]

Also, if these answers contained any code, it might end up the most used code you've ever written.

[caf]

Out of curiosity I've done code searches on identifying substrings and found code from my stackoverflow answers all over the place, though of course the hits tend to be in that long tail of seldom used code out there. Pretty sure my most used code would be in deliberate open source contributions.

[wingworks]

I'm in the top 3%, joined in 2010, it's mostly all from questions though. I only posted 8 answers, vs 83 questions. When I joined I remember allot of the issues I came across has no answers, so I guess with the years to come lots of others had the same issues/questions. At the time I thought it was just me, everyone else seems to know so much. Guess we all start at the bottom at some point.

[mrweasel]

It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.

[sitkack]

Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget.

A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.

[867-5309]

a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring

[Timothycquinn]

Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff.

Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.

[haakon]

After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.

[lylo]

That’s funny, so do I!

[nargella]

Method of Loci

[xpe]

Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.

[swivelmaster]

I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!

[dotancohen]

Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen

I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.

[int_19h]

There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant.

But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.

[barelyusable]

I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?

[jenyay]

You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes.

[1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange

[thefourthchime]

Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.