[fusiongyro]

Definitely. Most of my rep is from Prolog answers. I can spend an hour on a lengthy, detailed answer, and the best I can hope for is <4 votes and (maybe) an acceptance. Average return on an answer is probably 20 rep. OTOH, if I squeak a Haskell answer in, average is more like 50-100 rep because there's simply a lot more eyes on Haskell answers. At the same time, this means while there's a good hour or two window between a Prolog question being asked, it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question. The community is just really good like that. So there's a limiting factor problem there. Competition for MySQL and Postgres answers is also really high so you have to be really fast with your answering, but all my "greatest hits" were in Postgres.

Question-askers benefit the most from this competitiveness, but without a niche it would be really hard to break in. For a little while it seemed like people were starting to treat S.O. activity as a test of your virtue or capabilities as a programmer. Today it seems absurd to judge someone for not having an account. It's just too hard to get started.

[zerr]

Interesting, you talk about the competition, breaking in, monitoring unanswered questions so you can answer first, etc... - What's the motivation behind it?

I guess it is not just contributing to the common knowledge, but maybe to show off your profile to potential employers or similar?

[fusiongyro]

For me, I just like being helpful. The rep is nice too. Stupid internet points are pretty motivational, but I also review edits, and you don't get any rep for that. I would be flattered if an employer had noticed me on there, but I don't think it's likely to happen. I've been active on SO for longer than I've been active here, but I have gotten many friendly recruitment emails from here and none from there.

Prolog is an extremely small niche. Most of the questions are pretty basic and from students. I don't like seeing students being told odd things about Prolog, with a dismissive air of "Prolog makes no sense, you just have to feed it this nonsense to make it go." So another part of my motivation is to keep this sad religion alive and inviting. Haskell has a much larger community of people working very hard to make it inviting.

The hiring angle probably works better for other niches. Every Java EE question is answered by BalusC. I imagine that pays dividends for his consulting: he's the most helpful guy in that area and I'd hire him in a second if I were in charge of that kind of thing.

[tiedemann]

My last two job offers came from people who had checked out my SO answers among other things.

[fusiongyro]

Wow, I feel so disproven.

[praptak]

> it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question

My experience: it is still possible to come in an hour and beat the quick answers, although I agree with the other comments about the rep being somewhat unpredictable.