[bastawhiz]

I have a fair number of points on SO from asking and answering some common (and esoteric) questions. But I stopped, as a lot of folks don't mark answers as correct, so good answers don't get highlighted. Why give good advice if it's not marked as such?

I got an email a few months ago that one of my answers had been edited. It turns out that someone who—as best as I can tell—hasn't ever actually answered a question had reworded my answer, removed a ton of context, and in effect, made my answer incorrect.

I immediately changed it back. The person who edited my answer was doing this to farm points. With no understanding of the problem or my solution, they were racking up points simply by "cleaning up" answers.

I'm not going to say that this is killing SO. But it does seem like there are some perverse incentives that make it easy for folks to accrue points without actually being competent. And as long as SO points are considered a sign of competence, people will keep doing it.

[bombcar]

I have a suspicion that there are coding bootcamps or whatever that tell their students to do these things, as I've noticed multiple users doing basically the same (apparently point farming) thing.

Gamification works until it gets gamed.

[greazy]

I find the gamification on SO overwhelming. So many badges and stars and points for things I don't really understand because I haven't investigated.

Badges are dumb.

[BenjiWiebe]

Badges don't do anything at all on SO. Only points actually do anything. You get more privileges/capabilities with more points.

[Izkata]

Gold badge for a tag lets you close questions with that tag unilaterally instead of needing 3 users to vote on it. It's assumed you know enough about the topic you can do that, and it can still be overridden by 3 votes to reopen from other users.

[greazy]

That makes the situation even more confusing because a lot of emphasis is put on badges and less on points.

[fomine3]

People still want anything like badge that doesn't do anything, see game lootbox

[PaulHoule]

I never got into the "game" aspect on Stack Overflow, that is, to fully participate you have to get a certain number of points and I've never been motivated to play along.

Sites like SO are bad at recognizing the kind of knowledge you got because you spent three years training in the mountains, which I've got some of (as well as opinions about as well founded as those of David Brooks or Jim Cramer)

There was a trade publication that licensed the SO software and I made myself the #2 user on their instance by simply asking a large number of good questions. I could have dethroned the #1 user but didn't want to because he was a knowledgeable guy who wrote great answers. I went looking at SO to see if anyone had gotten to the top of the leaderboard by this strategy and didn't find any so they've got to have some different mechanisms that make this hard.