21–30 of 203 posts
My reputation slowed down to a crawl after becoming a moderator.
However, it doesn't mean that the sites stop being useful, I read a lot of questions, but rarely feel the need to ask a new one.
I'm somewhere near 7. I find Stack Overflow extremely frustrating to use since I never seem to have enough reputation to do anything. If I remember correctly I can't even comment I gave up trying to contribute and I now only leech. I wish they'd fix it because more than once I had insightful things to say but it wasn't worth the hassle.
I'm somewhere near 7. I find Stack Overflow extremely frustrating to use since I never seem to have enough reputation to do anything. If I remember correctly I can't even comment I gave up trying to contribute and I now only leech. I wish they'd fix it because more than once I had insightful things to say but it wasn't worth the hassle.
The problem with the SO reputation system is that one-sentence answers to some very basic problem end up earning you > 100 reputation, but a long, well-written answer to a niche question gets you maybe 10 or 20. I'm not really sure what the solution to this is (it's not dissimilar to the situation here since the comment scores got hidden).
I don't think there is a solution - popular stuff will be popular. Is a solution needed, though? The point is to get answers - votes from answers are the incentive, but in the end, it's just a bunch of numbers.
As long as the results are obvious - e.g. a question with answers having 75%, 15%, 10% and 5% of votes - it's not terribly interesting whether that means 15, 3, 2 and 1 vote, or 750, 150, 100 and 50. Also, being able to vote posts <0 is good - bogus answers will be apparent.
I participate a lot , but almost exclusively in the (HTML5) Canvas tag. Because I don't answer much else I've got a smallish reputation for a frequent visitor(12K). I'm the top answer-er for the Canvas tag, having answered around ~10% of all questions ever asked about Canvas on StackOverflow. I would say that reputation numbers don't necessarily measure engagement per se in S.O. very well. I've found that if I answer…
StackOverflow is one site where I never saw the appeal. I have stumbled upon it a few times through it being a top result during search, but the content seemed fairly flat, for lack of a better term. I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself. The StackOverfl…
I was quite active on the site for about a year, and then my enthusiasm for answering questions suddenly dropped off. I don't know if the quality of questions got worse or what.
Sometimes I miss the old days of comp.lang.c++.moderated. Except the part about being a C++ programmer, that is.
There is a little bit of gaming in SO that makes it hard to compete with others that are more dedicated to the site. For example, posting a quick answer and then editing it with the answers from others to complete your answer is one I've seen. I don't believe it to be unfair just that it takes effort beyond technical skills to get high rep values in SO. John Skeet aside, he's all technical skills ;p
I'm somewhere near 7. I find Stack Overflow extremely frustrating to use since I never seem to have enough reputation to do anything. If I remember correctly I can't even comment I gave up trying to contribute and I now only leech. I wish they'd fix it because more than once I had insightful things to say but it wasn't worth the hassle.
I agree, often I've wanted to add something, but I'm unable to because I haven't participated enough. I'm on the wrong side of the chicken and egg, so I just leech.
I've run a tiny experiment on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/779183/friar-tuck - it took me, from "logout and clear all cookies" to "Commenting privilege unlocked", twenty-five minutes (1500 seconds) of wall-time, start to finish; no cheating, no sockpuppetting - just answering three (3) easy questions in a mildly useful way and watching the upvotes roll in.
Alas, "I come to the __Q&A__ site 'often', but can't be bothered to __ask__ or __answer__ anything at all, how come they deny me privileges?" sounds a bit more entitled than "the System keeps me down and prevents me from commenting," doesn't it?