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Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#91

Post by joccam »

huhtenberg wrote: post #59

I find participating in SO extremely annoying. Tried few times and gave up. I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none. In general, there's ju…

news.ycombinator.com: nasty experience so far. Got bullied by some reputation whores. My reputation went from -2 to -19... and I even got locked _completely_ out of news.ycombinator.com during the experience. So my "karma" went down when I not only was NOT participating but was NOT even able to read the site. Total joke. One more thing: there's no cause-and-effect explanation for the negative karma --- I am just guessing it had to do with one particular guy and his buds.

Not a great way to promote participation. I posted in some detail about the experience, but did not get voted up. In my experience, YC's version of participation is definitely broken and promotes bullying and disinformation.

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

#94

Post by aforty »

I tried to answer some question once and it told me I needed reputation to submit an answer but it was not at all clear how I could acquire reputation to begin with. While I'm sure there's a relatively simple solution to this, I became frustrated and never looked into it further.

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

#96

Post by lambda »

pmjordan wrote: post #39
cruise02 wrote: post #25

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…

> 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.

This is a tough one. There already is a system for dealing with duplicates, which is to vote to close as a duplicate, but requires 5 people to so vote before it will actually be closed. You could reduce that number, but there would probably be concern about abuse and mistakes if you reduced that too far. The thing is, it's fairly labor intensive to actually find duplicate questions, and ensure that they really are duplicates. In many cases, it's just easier to answer the new question, than to dig out the duplicate, vote to close, and then, if you actually want to be helpful, explain in a comment why the question is a duplicate (since beginners might not understand how the other question answers theirs).

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

#98

Post by benatkin »

I spent a few hours during the course of a week last year and got 1000 in reputation. Most of the points I got were from quickly writing answers to boring questions before someone else could get around to writing an equally good one. I did get some points from going above and beyond, or from answering questions that hadn't been answered for a long time because they were from a niche I was familiar with. I suspect that most of the people with a lot of points are treating it like a game, though.

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

#99

Post by redler »

kijin wrote: post #61
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 asker just never bothered to click accept . . . and the original user is evidently no longer interested in getting it answered. I find this very annoying, too. I can understand why it would happen from the point of view of the asker: he might have found the answer on some other website 5 minutes later, or he might have just decided to find a workaround. Still, I think SO should remind people to accept answers (…

In theory, the system's "economics" encourage askers to accept an answer, as askers with low acceptance rates will receive fewer quality responses (and often comments reiterating the phenomenon). But there's little incentive for drive-by askers with no engagement with the community, such as it is, to choose an answer; a consequence of SO's growing popularity is that these users comprise the largest group (901K users with between 1 and 200 reputation).

There should probably be some mechanism by which moderators or other trusted users can, after a time, accept an answer for such abandoned questions. Perhaps questions thus answered would be treated slightly differently (and identified differently in the UI); the original asker could always return and override the proxy acceptance.

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