[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.