[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.

[eggsbenedict]

How do you explain the prices of Class-C shares which don't bestow voting rights to the holder? For example, GOOG trades for over 2000 a share. In fact, it even trades at a $50 premium over GOOGL, which offers voting rights. Strange.

[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.

[Retric]

As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream.

The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.

[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.

[bouncycastle]

Yes, cryptocurrency can be programmed in many different ways and can be defined as several different things at once.

[vmception]

PancakeBunny too! I’m considering to buy the dip…

[ekianjo]

Not all stocks have dividends.

[astrange]

The ones that don’t are valued on the assumption that they will in the future.

[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.