[wilhelm]

Disregarding the current date, this is actually a great idea. Instant gratification for a fee. Yes, I'd pay for that.

They could recruit their experts from the community itself, limited to those over a certain karma threshold, adding further incentive to participate.

[CamperBob2]

I'd definitely find it useful, and would pay for it. The trick is figuring out how to recruit/pay the "experts" who would need to be fairly high-value people but who would nevertheless have to make themselves available on a moment's notice.

And it had better not be implemented as one of those stupid unsolicited pop-up chat windows.

[gav]

The question I always have is: is a high karma a meaningful measurement of somebody's abilities?

[mediumdeviation]

Only partially. It's a combined measure of your knowledge and participation on the site.

> As a registered user, your reputation on the site is a part of your identity on the site. It reflects, to an extent, your familiarity with the site, the amount of subject matter expertise you have and the level of respect your peers have for you.

http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/7238/150097

In addition to that, it is possible to write well written, but highly specialized answers that gain few upvotes, or relatively simple answers that accrue large number of upvotes simply because it is a common question. In this sense, reputation is a measure of how 'valuable' your contribution to the site is, which is often, but not always aligned with how knowledgeable you are. There are other outliers too, like answers that get featured on Proggit or HN, but those are far less common.

(It also used to be possible to gain large amount of reputation by simply being the first to reply to a poll with a popular answer, but those type of questions are no longer acceptable).

[Mahn]

Nope. On SO at least there are lots of folks who amassed hundreds of thousands of reputation merely for being on the site early enough to be able to answer simple and common questions like "how I can remove an array member" and the like.

[NickLarsen]

I'm pretty sure the folks who have amassed "hundreds of thousands of reputation" did it merely by answering 1000's of questions.

http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/105837/how...

Sure there are a few questions with highly voted up answers because they are widely useful, but there is certainly the minority of high rep earners. Even the new people who are gaining lots of rep are doing it by answering hundreds of questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/users?tab=newusers

[wilhelm]

No, but it is a meaningful measurement of participation.

[frou_dh]

...and in a lot of cases, account age. I haven't participated in Stack Overflow for years, but there's still a steady trickle of points accumulating from my mediocre questions and answers of old.

[matchu]

I still visit the site regularly just to see how many new rep points I've gotten from old answers. What is my life?

[darkchasma]

Fools aside, this is a horrible idea. There are no experts here. There are loud people, and people with friends, but no community votes up the experts, only the eloquent, or the charismatic. Einstein wasn't president, JFK was. Some occasions, that's okay, but if I'm paying actual money, it certainly isn't.

[saryant]

I've seen people ask questions about Scala on SO and get answers from Martin Odersky, the language's inventor.

I'd say that counts as an expert.

[darkchasma]

I agree 100%, and it's my point.

[dionidium]

You don't think the top users on SO are experts?

[pekk]

The question is whether they are domain experts or SO experts

[sklivvz1971]

That's a false dichotomy.

[hkmurakami]

Sounds like what Quora is/was doing with their currency system (are they still doing this?)