[hnreader1230]

Years ago I tried to answer a comment on StackOverflow, but I didn’t have enough points to comment. So I tried to answer some questions so that I could get enough points to comment. But when looking at the new questions, it seemed to be mostly a pile of “I have a bug in my code please fix it” type stuff. Relatively simple answers to “What is the stack and the heap?” had thousands of points, but also already had tons of answers (though I suppose one of the reason why people keep answering is to harvest points). I was able to answer a question on an obscure issue that no one had answered yet, but received no points.

Then I saw that you could get points for editing answers. OK, I thought, I can get some points by fixing some bugs. I found a highly upvoted post that had code that didn’t work, found that it was because one section had used the wrong variable, and tried to fix it. Well, the variable name was too short to meet the necessary 6 characters to edit the code (something like changing “foo” to “bar”).

I went to see what other people did in these situations, and they suggested just adding unnecessary edits in order to reach the character limit.

At that point, I just left the bug in, and gave up on trying to contribute to Stack Overflow.

[CrazyStat]

I was active on the statistics Stack Exchange for a while in grad school. There were generally plenty of interesting questions to answer, but the obsession some people (the most active people, generally) had with the points system became really unpleasant after a while.

My breaking point was when I saw a question with an incorrect answer. I posted a correct answer, explained why the other answer was incorrect, and downvoted the incorrect answer. The author of the incorrect answer then posted a rant as a comment on my answer about how I shouldn't have downvoted their answer because they were going to fix it, and a couple other people chimed in agreeing that it was inconsiderate or inappropriate of me to have downvoted the other answer.

I decided Stack Exchange was dumb and stopped spending time there, which was probably good for my PhD progress.

[chias]

The trick to getting a lot of reputation on Stack Overflow and the like is to have posted a long time ago and then just leave it alone.

I was quite active on stack overflow back around 2010, asking a lot of questions, answering questions when I knew the answers, and so on. The idea of getting a gold badge seemed wildly crazy, and someone who had one (or even two!) was clearly a sign that they knew what was what. I used it for a while, never made much of a reputation, but did manage to earn a small handful of silver badges which I was quite proud of.

Then I forgot about it for quite a while.

Fast forward to today. My reputation chart just keeps going up at a steady linear rate. At this point I am in the top 3% of users with 14,228 reputation and 25 gold badges. I haven't been active in a decade. I don't know what most of my badges even are.

---

Most of my reputation comes from my questions. In case you're wondering what a top-3%er's top questions looks like, they are:

Apr 15, 2011 (207) -- CSS: bolding some text without changing its container's size

Aug 19, 2009 (110) -- How long should SQL email fields be? [duplicate]

Jun 29, 2010 (89) -- php: check if an array has duplicates

Jul 3, 2010 (63) -- centering a div between one that's floated right and one that's floated left

Jan 5, 2010 (44) -- CodeIgniter sessions vs PHP sessions

Apr 12, 2011 (40) -- Java: what's the big-O time of declaring an array of size n?

Jan 11, 2011 (28) -- Javascript / CSS: set (firefox) zoom level of iframe?

Jul 15, 2010 (25) -- Javascript: get element's current "onclick" contents

Aug 22, 2009 (21) -- SQL: what exactly do Primary Keys and Indexes do?

Jul 3, 2010 (20) -- Getting the contents of an element WITHOUT its children [duplicate]

For anyone keeping score, that last one one was marked as a duplicate of a question that was asked a year after mine, and which seems similar on the surface to someone who does not have a good understanding of the DOM structure but is actually not the same thing.

[geraldwhen]

Exactly this. I have a very, very high point score well beyond yours for being very active 13 years ago.

I have well over 50 gold badges.

I haven’t used stackoverflow in at least 5 years, probably longer, and I stopped contributing about 10 years ago.

[allannienhuis]

I have a similar experience. About 10 years ago, I had some time on my hands for about 6 months, and answered a bunch of questions, with a small handful of them (3-4) getting a lot of upvotes. I haven't answered a question in years and years, but those same few questions keep getting new upvotes every month, so my progress continues to climb sort of linearly. I'm in the top 7% of contributors this year, while contributing exactly nothing new...

[dleeftink]

From a cursory glance, would you say these are still issues people run into? Aggregating these initial questions and the amount of activity they generate up until this day should tell us much about the progress and stagnation of certain programming languages/libraries/frameworks/else and their usage barriers.

[chias]

In most cases, yes, but I don't think it implies stagnation. With the exception of the CSS ones which have been obsoleted by modern flexbox, those questions are mostly basic enough to defy change:

php: check if an array has duplicates

Java: what's the big-O time of declaring an array of size n?

SQL: what exactly do Primary Keys and Indexes do?

[dleeftink]

I agree, plateauing may be more apt in this case. I wonder to what extent exemplary questions like these remain universal, or have an expiry date that just isn't known at this time.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

> I suppose one of the reason why people keep answering is to harvest points

It's interesting to see some of the top (5- or 6-digit SO scores) people's activity charts.

They usually have a 3-5-digit answer history, and a 1-digit question history, with the digit frequently being "0."

In my case, I have asked almost twice as many questions, as I have given answers[0].

For a long time, I had a very low SO score (I've been on the platform for many years), but some years ago, they decided to award questions the same score as answers (which pissed a lot of people off), and my score suddenly jumped up. It's still not a top score, but it's a bit less shabby.

Over the years, I did learn to ask questions well (which means they get ignored, as opposed to insulted -an improvement), but these days, I don't bother going there, anymore.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/users/879365/chris-marshall

[Intralexical]

If you get enough points on one of the more niche and less toxic StackExchange sites, it'll also let you comment, vote, etc. network-wide.

I had gotten most of my points by asking and answering things about Blender workflow/API/development specifics, so I got to skip some of the dumb gatekeeping on StackOverflow.

Worldbuilding's fun, too­— Codegolf's not bad either, if you can come up with an interesting way to do it— Arquade looks good, and so does Cooking— Literature, English, Scifi, etc look interesting— If you program software, I suppose CodeReview might be a safe bet.

[gigatexal]

Yeah ... the extra critical nature of SO is why their lunch is being eaten by LLMs. I once had a buddy who is now super duper senior at Amazon working on the main site to ask his Q on SO and he flat out said no because he'd had hostile interactions before when asking questions. Right or wrong the reputation that they've developed has hurt them a ton.

[lawlessone]

>it seemed to be mostly a pile of “I have a bug in my code please fix it” type stuff.

it's mostly people asking you to do their comp sci homework.

[Guvante]

The edit queue was sitting at over 40k at one point.

Unfortunately people trying to game the system creates enormous work for those who can review.

(Not saying you were doing anything wrong just pointing out why there are automated guards)

[kevin_thibedeau]

You need to focus on niche tags to find worthwhile unanswered questions. Browsing the $foolang tag is just for the OCD FOMO types who spend their day farming rep.