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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?

#81

Post by 100k »

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…

I wouldn't say 12K reputation is "smallish". I have just under 6K (mainly from ruby-on-rails and google-app-engine) and according to Stack Overflow that puts me in the top 6% of users overall.

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

#82

Post by pmjordan »

itsadok wrote: post #68
pmjordan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the "unanswered" section is full of questions that have been answered, the asker just never bothered to click accept. Answered questions appear in Unanswered only if no answer has been voted up. If you see a question with a good answer, just vote it up and clear the clutter for the next person looking at the Unanswered section.

Good to know. I tend to upvote anything good I see anyway, so I've already been decluttering the unanswered section without realising.

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

#83

Post by cruise02 »

davelnewton wrote: post #46
cruise02 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Technically, being first is an advantage if you're the first to answer and it's accepted and there's 10+ upvotes. If getting another badge is an "advantage".

If your answer is accepted with 10 upvotes then being first wasn't the advantage, being right was.

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

#84

Post by jonstjohn »

jxf wrote: post #56

I'm one of the top-rated users on StackOverflow. While I feel like my answers are high quality, I also feel like I didn't work very hard to get there. There are days where I never log onto StackOverflow but nevertheless earn 100+ points per day. For example, a few weeks back I answered an obscure question about an unusual expression in the Linux kernel. Someone posted it on HN and it blew up. I continue to earn "inte…

Completely agree. I'm a mid-range user but participated early on. I answered some very basic questions (how to you rotate an image in jQuery) and continue to accumulate residual reputation almost every day.

I've found that it is somewhat harder to get reputation now since a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been consumed. I still check on it from time to time and think it's a great resource.

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

#85

Post by ars »

lifebeyondfife wrote: post #43

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…

If I have the answer, but it will take some time to type it out, I will hit save after answering part of it (not even a complete part - I hit save after the first line or two).

Then I'll edit it to be a complete answer. (Release early, release often :) By doing this other answers see that someone else is working on it and won't also answer the question (this way they don't cost me points, but it also prevents them from wasting their time, so it helps both of us).

This is only necessary in the more popular question categories.

Also, once you have enough reputation the interface becomes faster and it's easier to race the answers.

That said, I got a bit tired of the race, and semi-retired.

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

#86

Post by polshaw »

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).

Well it is a barrier that has stopped me participating too. It is very easy to dismiss these when you, and all those around you, are beyond them.

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

#87

Post by thenduks »

funkah wrote: post #34

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.

Try just being helpful to other people and not worrying about reputation points and badges and who's going to use the answer for what potentially commercial purpose.

It can be pretty rewarding to have someone thank you profusely for helping them figure something out. And you can learn a lot too -- sometimes to answer a question I'll have to actually go and research it a bit, or make a JSFiddle, that kind of thing.

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

#88

Post by aidenn0 »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #24
udp wrote: post #15

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).

Not always - see e.g. this (shameless self-plug): http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 . 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 te…

I think that one gets so many upvotes because people who know how hard it is to send a lot of e-mail love to point that answer to people who don't (e.g. bosses, clients) making it very useful to a lot of people.

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

#89

Post by JeremyBanks »

ajo11 wrote: post #69
robsteranium wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by my reputation history the best way to reach the 50 points needed to leave comments is (perhaps unsurprisingly) to write some answers! I suggest you find some unanswered questions under tags with which you're familiar. I actually think the system works quite well; most SO comments are worth reading. One peculiarity of the privileges that I've found is that I'm not allowed to make edits with fewer than 6 cha…

Yeah, this thing with the typos must be improved. Quite often it's a matter of 1 or 2 characters.

Just a point of clarification: users who can edit immediately (those over 2000 rep) can make edits of any length. The length limit is enforced for "suggested edits", which need to be approved by two other users and for which the editor earns +2 reputation.
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