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How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

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Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#11

Post by DrJokepu »

d4nt wrote: post #3
simonw wrote: post #2

Looks 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.

To be honest I don't see that as a problem; first, the people answering a question are the people who are more likely to come back, read other answers and possibly downvote the very bad ones. Leaving negative comments is very obvious too, you won't get too far with that. Second, it never happened to me (and I've spent way too much time on SO), never seen it happening so I suppose this can't be too widespread.

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#12

Post by ajg1977 »

d4nt wrote: post #3
simonw wrote: post #2

Looks 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.

No, it IS a bad thing. What you get (and what happens on SO) is that certain people will post something, anything, to new posts so they have the first comment. They then spend the next five minutes gradually expanding their answer either based on their own knowledge or worse of all, by cherry picking info from other peoples answers.

This is certainly not the case with every answer, and it it may be more prevalent under some tags than others. However it happens enough that I've become fed-up of crafting well thought out replies just to see them copy+pasted, with some minor word changes, into answers from first-posters.

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#13

Post by sireat »

keyist wrote: post #6

Out 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 g…

Tip No. 1 is a bit similar to Jeopardy strategy of ringing in the buzzer as fast as possible and figuring out the answer afterwards.

Sadly, people will respect someone more with 10k gamed points than someone with 1000 honest points, because we have placed implicit trust in SO ranking system.

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#14

Post by draegtun »

jrockway wrote: post #7

Yeah, 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…

Hmmm... I dont do this... perhaps thats why I'm still only around 3500 points :(

I rarely downvote an answer preferring to just upvote correct & good answers. So unless answer is a real "stinker" then I just reserve downvotes for trolls & language flamers

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#15

Post by reedlaw »

What's missing from this piece is an answer to why I should care about getting Stackoverflow reputation? Besides access to the "special moderation tools", is there any benefit to justify the time I would spend to amass more than 10,000 points? I think that the only reason someone should use a site like Stackoverflow, or HN for that matter, is that he enjoys it. So from that perspective, there is little incentive to "game" the system.

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#16

Post by mattmanser »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #8

The 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....)

My guess is that now it's on HN they'll do something about it ;)

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#18

Post by jasonkester »

The strange thing about this is that the StackOverflow team seems to think that people will use these reputation points for hiring decisions. They have little widgets you can embed into your site to display your reputation, and I've even heard them suggest that developers put it on their resumes.

I can't think of a better indicator of somebody not to hire than a guy with 10,000+ reputation on any community site. You can only get that sort of rep with a 4hr+/day commitment over a period of several months.

That time is pretty much guaranteed to happen at the office. I'd hate to have to take up the slack for one of those guys. Worse, I'd hate to have a room full of employees spending their days gaming StackOverflow on my dime.

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#19

Post by Yrlec »

simonw wrote: post #2

Looks 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 funny thing is that Joel Spolsky seems to be very aware of the problems with point systems: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/09.html

Re: How to get Stackoverflow Reputation

#20

Post by messel »

You've exposed some systematic weaknesses of the SO quality score. If I worked for SO I'd thank you.

My proposed solution is to manually identify X judges who represent a nicecross section of programming backgrounds. These judges are selected by their continued support and passion for helping programmers. Over time their upvotes would create new quality judges in an intelligent manner.

I used a system like this for characterizing 3D shapes in the protein database (kinase). The templates were created from known kinase chains, we called them motifs. Thanks to Tony Sommese, and Jim Dwulit for really making it happen (I just helped out on that project).

Another case for this model is crystal formation. Seed crystals allow for fractal like formation of patterns in supporting media dishes.

Googles voting system also relies on "reliable" sources to help judge the value of links.

Reference papers use citations to determine how close an author is to a renowned scientist.

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