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The common complaint about stackoverflow reputation is that it's a function of the number of questions answered and not actual skill. http://stackrating.com/ ht
by tgamblin 11y ago
The common complaint about stackoverflow reputation is that it's a function of the number of questions answered and not actual skill. http://stackrating.com/ http://stackrating.com/ gives an Elo rating of stackoverflow users, where you're rated by how well you answer relative to others (sort of like a ladder).
Jon Skeet is #2 on the Elo scale, so not only is he answering a lot of questions; his answers get upvoted more than others. He really is giving good answers, in addition to being quite prolific. Eric Lippert might be the more interesting data point, though -- despite being 23rd in reputation, he's #1 on the Elo scale.
- hooloovoo_zoo 11y agoIt could be that people tend to upvote names they recognize too.
- kqr 11y agoAlso starting bounties (which some users tend to do quite liberally when their curiosity is piqued by some question) loses you reputation.
- mark-r 11y agoThanks for the link to the Elo scale. Kind of depressing though when I looked myself up, I'm much lower there than I am on SO's rank.
- jkubicek 11y agoI'm suspicious of the Elo scale, at least used to rank folks who aren't near the top of the reputation scales. I'm ranked 2600th for reputation, but 3.5 millionth for rating. I'm not surprised that other people are doing a better job of answering questions than me, but to say that I'm in the bottom 5% of users is highly suspect. I'm active in reviewing other users's flagged questions, I've seen what the bottom of the barrel looks like and my answers are certainly not it.
- mattmanser 11y agoNot only that, but you've made 400 answers compared to my 125 answers but have almost 7x the SO score and yet I'm rated 12,975th compared to your 3,575,349th. Definitely not right.
- abecedarius 11y agoSO is much less objective than chess: people tend to upvote what others upvoted just because they see it first, they see how many votes there already were, etc. Your rank there is not worth paying very much attention to, though there is some useful signal to improve your writing with. (It lists me at around 9000th for Elo and 8000th for votes, so yeah, I peeked.)
- dionidium 11y agoI like to answer old questions whenever I think there's crucial information missing in the existing answers. This almost guarantees that you'll be one of the lower-voted answers for that question. I don't think the Elo scale accounts for this dynamic, but the timing of answers is a big part of how SO works. That is, you can't directly compare the score on an answer given 45 seconds in to one given 2 years later. The results will be useless (for the same reason that far fewer people are going to see this comment than if I had posted it 12 hours ago).