How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
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How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#2Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community norms to keep the quality high.
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#3Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community norms to keep the quality high.
The only advice that really worries me is the advice to downvote competing answers. Getting votes for providing quick answers that you then refine is not a bad thing. But I think Jeff and the team may need to prevent people who've answered already from downvoting other answers, otherwise you could be right.
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#4Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community norms to keep the quality high.
As always, ED tells the horrible truth: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Yahoo!_Answers#How_to_Play
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#5These tips describe a fairly "premeditated" approach to gaining reputation, but like anything that yields a reward, it's just reality that people look for optimizations.
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#6Out of the 6 tips provided, "write relevant, detailed answers" wasn't one of them. Quite the contrary, in fact:
"1. Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality."
Gaming a reputation system just means you figured out how to maximize a number determined by some arbitrary formula. Real life reputation works differently. People aren't going to remember the dude with 10k points. They will remember the person who guided them through one of their problems. Or the person who consistently shows up with quality feedback under a certain topic.
By gaming the system you're only making it harder for others to use the mechanisms the site provides for signalling quality. Fortunately most humans have the insight to not rely solely on a number.
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#7Yeah, I do the downvoting thing from time to time. If there are few answers, and I think mine is slightly better, I will downvote them so mine goes to the top. This usually results in lots of points, since people see mine at the top and upvote, and see the others at the bottom, and downvote them. (The same thing works here, but I don't do it. My comments usually get upvoted anyway, for some reason.)
The funny part is that someone "noticed" this and complained to me about it. (There was a whole meta thread about it, which I thought was hilarious.) In that case, though, his answers were just plain bad, and I had to downmod his answer and answer the question myself just so that people would not be horribly misguided by his high reputation but wrong answers.
Anyway, I hate to "game" sites like StackOverflow, but there is no incentive not to. If I get banned, it just means people won't get my knowledge for free anymore. I have never needed to ask a question there; I have a social network for that (which can't be "gamed", btw).
(As to why I care about rep, I don't know. It just feels good to get a lot of points, I guess. It's like winning the lottery, except you can't cash in reputation for goods and services...)
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#8The more interesting question, for me at least, is to consider what kind of tweaks StackOverflow could make to the reputation system in order to improve the quality of the content.
I'm a bit surprised that Atwood & Co. don't seem to be more interested in this. (I opened a question on meta.stackoverflow.com to discuss precisely this point, and got almost no response whatsoever....)
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#9This kind of BS ruins the site.
I suppose it's inevitable with points based system.
Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation
#10Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community norms to keep the quality high.
It is inevitable that any Q&A system managed by the masses versus a knowledgeable few will descend into mediocrity. The harder the question is, the fewer people will vote on it, and even fewer would be qualified to vote on it.
Having said that, I think Stackoverflow does a reasonable job of coping with it, but abuse still goes on. I only first noticed these tactics when they were used against me. Without naming any names, I can tell you that many of the people with 15k+ rep have used these tactics.