[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.