I 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 lo

I 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).