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Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

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Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#31

Post by pkamb »

cruise02 wrote: post #11
cmer wrote: post #4

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.

You only need 50 reputation to comment anywhere on the site. That's only 5 upvotes on a good answer or 10 upvotes on questions. It's an extremely low bar to get over. Note: You can always comment on your own posts (questions or answers).

It's extremely frustrating when you want to comment on a different Stack Exchange site but can't due to having no reputation... despite the fact that the new account you made is 'linked' to one on Stack Overflow with thousands of rep.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#32

Post by cruise02 »

pkamb wrote: post #31
cruise02 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need 50 reputation to comment anywhere on the site. That's only 5 upvotes on a good answer or 10 upvotes on questions. It's an extremely low bar to get over. Note: You can always comment on your own posts (questions or answers).

It's extremely frustrating when you want to comment on a different Stack Exchange site but can't due to having no reputation... despite the fact that the new account you made is 'linked' to one on Stack Overflow with thousands of rep.

If you have thousands of reputation on SO then you should get the 100 point bonus on every site where your accounts are associated. If you don't have it, open a support post on Meta (http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions) and we'll try to see what's up.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#33

Post by debacle »

I used to participate a lot, but after having ~5 questions go unanswered or only getting shotgun answers, and seeing the general consensus be that a short answer to an easy question is worth more than a long answer to a hard question, I'm not really interested. The reputation isn't of huge interest to me, however the gamification of the site, I think, has led to it being mostly about gamification - It's infinitely easier to find my answer on IRC, reddit, or in meatspace, which should not be the case - SO should be easier than reddit and meatspace for sure.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#34

Post by funkah »

I guess I always thought it was a fool's errand to contribute to some company's corpus of knowledge which they will surely sell or profit from, and the only reward is an integer somewhere gets incremented. But it turns out the content on StackOverflow is licensed to the community in some way. So, I don't really have an excuse anymore.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#35

Post by jessriedel »

randomdata wrote: post #10

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 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.

In fact, the mission of SO is precisely that: compile as much knowledge as possible in the form of answers to very specific question. There are many forums out there to cover "enrichment", but until SO came around it was significantly more difficult to find answers to specific questions amid the chaff.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#36

Post by cfeduke »

debacle wrote: post #33

I used to participate a lot, but after having ~5 questions go unanswered or only getting shotgun answers, and seeing the general consensus be that a short answer to an easy question is worth more than a long answer to a hard question, I'm not really interested. The reputation isn't of huge interest to me, however the gamification of the site, I think, has led to it being mostly about gamification - It's infinitely ea…

I feel the same way - I manage okay answering questions but the tough questions I ask typically go unanswered or are never satisfactorily answered. There just isn't incentive for other people to answer them. (The bounty system doesn't work as intended.)

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#37

Post by stephencanon »

simonsarris wrote: post #14

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…

Could not agree more. I have the same relationship to the [floating-point] tag. It's very satisfying to help out with the detailed questions that no one else is answering, instead of trying to beat the rush to answer the silly operator-precedence questions.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#38

Post by Xion »

A little above 5k [1]. I used to be quite active in Java, Android and Python department when I was still learning a lot on those topics. Now when I'm a bit more proficient in them I usually do not have motivation to answer questions, for they mostly don't seem interesting enough to be worth the hassle. Ironically, my "best" answer [2] is related to JavaScript & jQuery - something that I don't really use all that much.

Probably the biggest problem I find with SO is the speed-typing contest that many questions introduce if they are (1) relatively simple to answer (2) posted under popular tag. I admit I am "guilty" of using this to my advantage few times, but after a while it loses its appeal. For one, it doesn't really encourage posting comprehensive and well thought answer, as you are very likely to lose the "race" this way. Although posting a simple answer fast and iterating it through edits alleviates this issue somewhat, it still feels more like a trivia contest with speed limit rather than an attempt to teach someone a small but valuable lesson.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/434799/xion [2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/8277968/434799

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#39

Post by pmjordan »

cruise02 wrote: post #25
simonsarris wrote: post #14

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…

Reputation points in niche tags are definitely harder won than in the popular language tags, but (as you've demonstrated) it's easier to climb to the top of a niche tag and establish yourself as an expert. The real-world reputation you gain from that is more valuable than the reputation score on the site. Great job!

The high-traffic tags are full of low-quality or frequently asked questions. The amount of duplication in e.g. the C++ tag is staggering, but there doesn't seem to be a conscious effort to enforce a no-duplicate policy of any kind. Picking out worthwhile questions is difficult with all that noise. Worse, the "unanswered" section is full of questions that have been answered, the asker just never bothered to click accept. After a few upvotes to one of the answers and enough elapsed time that should probably happen automatically. There are also a lot of questions which cannot be answered given the information provided, and the original user is evidently no longer interested in getting it answered.

As you say though, you really can help people who have difficult questions in the niche tags (I've been spending far too much time in 'iokit' and 'objective-c++'). One upvote plus your answer accepted (total +25) is all you can hope for, though.

Re: Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

#40

Post by Wilduck »

randomdata wrote: post #10

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…

If you're looking for high quality discussion, SO probably isn't your best bet. Although I have learned a _ton_ about a new topic by doing a search on a topic, and then ordering the questions by votes or favorites. For example, this is the most voted question for haskell, which has some decent discussion:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/how-to-learn-hask...

The second most voted question for the 'c' tag has some interesting discussion on compiler optimization and floating point arithmetic:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6430448/why-doesnt-gcc-op...

Most of the time I use StackOverflow as kind of a warm up to writing my own code. It's a good intermediary step between reading HN and actually getting something done.

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