41–50 of 203 posts
Most of my reputation points come from residual answers.
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.)
Most of the questions on SO are easily answered with a proper Google search. It's a skill that should be taught.
I therefore spend too much time F5-ing to find a new unanswered question which is time consuming in the extreme and not sustainable long term.
Is this just a phase to be worked through or do I need to continue dedicating large amounts of time? Or do I just suck and haven't yet taken the hint?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 acce…
Any forum that welcomes new users is going to have this problem. The same kind of thing happened on Forrst, which should probably have been a little more resistant.
I was very active during the beta and launch, and was in the top 3 pages by rep for a while, but I became less active just because I didn't have much time. I still go on almost every day, but i just look at the featured questions on front page and maybe will answer one if it's something I know, but usually don't. Most of my reputation points come from residual answers.
When they first got out of the gate, I answered a whole bucket of questions, but stopped after about six months when I launched my first startup.
Nowadays, the number of unanswered questions on the site is pretty low overall -- we're basically in the long tail of Stack Overflow karma.
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
People rarely upvote crap answers, and all answers are displayed in random order if they have the same score, so being first doesn't really confer any advantage. Quality answers usually float to the top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Agreed... If I have a question that I really can't find the answer anywhere else, odds are I'm not going to get a good result on SO either. This is why I've only got 2 questions on my profile. One I eventually answered myself, and one with no helpful answer (but someone did make an effort.) Most of the questions on SO are easily answered with a proper Google search. It's a skill that should be taught.
Which is kind of counter to Jeff Atwood's recent blog post about the role of asking questions on SO.
Does anyone have the same problem with SO that I do? I'm an experienced dev in some general / mature technologies, mainly the C-like languages (I know C# inside out) but essentially, nothing too specialised. Anytime I've gone on SO to try to contribute I find it hard to find questions to answer. It's either a race to answer a trivial question quickly, or an obscure - possibly badly worded or incomplete - question tha…