[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.

[warrenm]

And then they would have gotten the rep

They're fake points that don't matter