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I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overfl

by dested 5y ago

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. Unrelated story, I have a day one Stack Overflow account. I don't remember how I found it but I'm sure it was posted on digg or slashdot or something at the time. I had a lot of posts in the first few years about some generally broad concepts, and completely inactive since. In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest!

caturopath 5y ago
I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.
- jrockway 5y ago
  Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.
  - geerlingguy 5y ago
    Some of my oldest answers have hundreds of votes and required minimal effort to answer well... some of the newer answers have less than ten votes, since they're much more niche (even if they take 10x the effort to answer well). A lot of the early broad answers got those huge upvote counts and make the early users who answered them stay in the top percentiles.
  - caturopath 5y ago
    Yeah, the continued upvotes for the same old questions doesn't surprise me, doubly so given the nasty culture of trying your best to close all new questions. Today, if someone posts a question, it will be closed as a duplicate (whether or not it actually is), or as too broad or too narrow. My main SO contribution in the last several years has been votes to re-open, which don't tend to get enough to actually re-open. My real surprise isn't the continued flow of points, just the apparent stasis. I could imagine being at 0.003% by now, for instance, from this phenomenon.
  - iSnow 5y ago
    There really should be some karma decay system to prevent early users hogging 5-figure reputation. I didn't do much there in the last 5y but I am still way up in reputation.
    - jagger27 5y ago
      I think this idea combined with the “is this answer still relevant” flag that was recently added would work well. I see no reason to devalue old but still good answers.
      - mark-r 5y ago
        Sometimes you're forced to work with older technology, and it's nice that you can still find answers to questions that many would consider obsolete. I'd hate to see a clean-up effort that makes that information go away forever.
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Gradual 5 year drop-off for effective karma might do community good. As such any post older than that would have zero effective karma, but you could still show historic karma. Maybe this would make moderation better for new users as old hostile ones lose their power if they don't keep participating in the same pit as rest new userbase...
    - mark-r 5y ago
      I don't see how you can call it "hogging". Having a high reputation doesn't prevent anyone else from getting a high reputation too. For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.
      - iSnow 5y ago
        SO had quite some toxic moderators who came in early and dominated everything because of their 5-fig karma. It drove me away from helping out there.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Same. “Top N%” looks to just use score, and momentum on old answers is a big deal. I’m top 0.24%, with my score having increased by about 50% (25,000) in the last 3½ years (as far as their little chart shows), overwhelmingly because of momentum on old answers from 2010–2015—for during that time I’ve only made a handful of edits, three question, and six answers, three of which were for my own three questions.
munk-a 5y ago
It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you're looking to retire.
- jononor 5y ago
  One could try selling answers as Non Fungible Tokens, especially if you have some wierd ones. Lots of geeks have crypto to mess around with, and might want to pay for some bragging rights. Which is the only NFTs can really hope to be good for.
  - ivanche 5y ago
    Hahah, neat idea. I can't think of a more "NFT-able" answer than this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
- dystroy 5y ago
  I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.
  - saalweachter 5y ago
    Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing? [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...
    - dystroy 5y ago
      Those questions, anybody having spent time answering thousands of questions had to think about it. When you realize an SO account isn't really worth much for your brand, you may realize other benefits of your participation: the rare pleasure of really helping somebody (sometimes, not when answering trivial questions), the enjoyment you get from a very fun game (if you're into it) and the knowledge you build for yourself (I forced myself to watch some tags just because they were about technologies I didn't knew and that I wanted to learn). IMO you have to stop when it becomes boring. I stopped participating for 3 or 4 years before I learnt Rust and felt the need to see what other people were asking about the language and the approaches other people had to solve problems.
couchdb_ouchdb 5y ago
Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall. https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments
- pan69 5y ago
  I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
  - swivelmaster 5y ago
    I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.
    - sitkack 5y ago
      Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget. A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
      - 867-5309 5y ago
        a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring
benschulz 5y ago
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven't gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it's not about compound interest but new users joining.
- deleted 5y ago
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- JadeNB 5y ago
  > I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. Isn't being in the top 7% up, not down, from being only in the top 12%?
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    His point stands nonetheless. The "top n-%" contribution would also improve if the lurker userbase increases. No need for continuous up-votes of old answers
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Up in standing, but 7 is less than 12, so numerically down.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Same here, also 7%. But I benefited from a recalc of the question vs answer points. You might have as well?
incanus77 5y ago
Similarly, I answered a few hundred questions some years back when I was running mobile at Mapbox and they were growing, and now I’m in the top 8% despite not doing much the past five years. Interesting.
iSnow 5y ago
It's relatively easy if you really take the time to answer questions. Around 2016, I wanted to get deeper into some tech and used the learning curve to answer SO questions. I basically stopped the same year, but I am still in the top 8%, used to be top 1% for a couple of months. Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  > Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution. Probably another case of the 1% rule[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
EMM_386 5y ago
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! That's how I'm in the top 5%. My old posts that are still relevant get votes. Every time I log in there is a new notification about how many more points I have.
- Macha 5y ago
  Yeah, top 3% for stuff like being the first person to ask about terminal colour codes and explain typedef. Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal that weren't already asked or answered for any new users to get their rep as easily
- surfearth 5y ago
  In 2013, I asked a question that I then answered myself. It turned out to be a fairly common question and my response now has more than 101k views. It's remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort/highest benefit to others online action in my life.
TylerH 5y ago
The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1. I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.
- usrusr 5y ago
  After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There's an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print. This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see. Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls grow higher over time?
  - bhandziuk 5y ago
    Just positively edit a few questions. You'll get rep for that. https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate from there.
    - nickysielicki 5y ago
      For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer? You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality questions and very high quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further down and finding the correct answer that has zero upvotes).
andrewljohnson 5y ago
Top 3% for me, I guess on the strength of being early in the iOS ecosystem, inactive for a decade My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=profile https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...
- halfdan 5y ago
  You just made me check - "top 0.84% overall". Haven't posted in a long long time and it looks like my points keep growing pretty much linearly.
throwaway894345 5y ago
It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.
- zaptrem 5y ago
  Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)
  - gervwyk 5y ago
    I must agree, their reach must be insane! Although my last question was like 3 years ago, I do visit it at least twice a week for quick answers. I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions. Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
    - palijer 5y ago
      I'd say a lot of that stuff increases with value to an individual over time, but has less demand. Some of those SO discussions are the only references to ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any questions about it today would not get any answers. So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore demand, it can be more valuable.
irrational 5y ago
Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.
- soperj 5y ago
  What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right now? Asking for a friend.
  - geoduck14 5y ago
    Tesla
- Loveaway 5y ago
  Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because I thought they peaked. Trying not to think about that too much:)
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    Wow...crazy
- tharne 5y ago
  Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren't. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of practically the entire internet.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    I don't think many people who do something big and attribute the success to their own foresight are being truthful.
lordnacho 5y ago
Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.
- ritchiea 5y ago
  I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work. On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
  - mikeywazowski 5y ago
    This person has freely put in the effort to provide a solution to a problem you have at work, and you can't even be bothered to click the upvote button? Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
    - antifa 5y ago
      Can't upvote on SO without spending ??? hours farming karma. People start answers with "don't have enough reputation to comment, but in response to the other answer [...]". Left the only answer on several questions, probably averaging 0.2 upvotes per answer. My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes. I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes. Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y. If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
mythz 5y ago
> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site This isn't hard since the majority of people are just browsing the site instead of contributing to it, e.g. I'm in top 0.09% from just answering support questions for our product from a minority of users who prefer asking on StackOverflow instead of our Customer Forums.
deleted 5y ago
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lilyball 5y ago
I don’t remember how I joined but my profile is apparently older than the official launch date according to Wikipedia? Anyway, I used it heavily for a few years, then pretty much stopped entirely in 2012. And like you I’ve continued to rack up karma, such that I’m still in the top 0.06% somehow. It’s kind of nuts.
the_only_law 5y ago
Top 7% as well, but most of that came from shitty questions (both by my own standards now and SO standards) that happened to get a little traction so I don't put much stock in the score.
make3 5y ago
(this is not compound interest.. )
- make3 5y ago
  compound interest is interest proportional to how much you already have. This is like fixed absolute interest. Not sure why I was downvoted.
swiley 5y ago
>You must create a new Microsoft 365 hotlive account to reply to this message.
teen 5y ago
Me too! My user id is 26 :P
goatinaboat 5y ago
I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Many repo owners close discussion that ain't bugs or feature request because of moderation workload.
tootie 5y ago
Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-specific StackExchange communities.
deleted 5y ago
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skohan 5y ago
I'm actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like we're headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation, and I'd be happy if not all the developer tools are controlled by one interested party
- human 5y ago
  I totally agree with you. Legislators should watch out for too much power consolidation here.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    I am not sure, if developer tools are on the watchlist of state regulators, nor am I sure, if they should be.
nanis 5y ago
Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of Perl answers. Haven't been very active recently. As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830 based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754 Some of my useful answers get no upvotes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754 And some just keep accumulating :-) https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754 Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you'll see the following table: Total Rep* Users ----------------------- 100,000+ | 1,007 50,000+ | 2,879 25,000+ | 7,533 10,000+ | 23,325 5,000+ | 50,374 3,000+ | 85,384 2,000+ | 125,638 1,000+ | 229,491 500+ | 398,573 200+ | 675,767 1+ | 14,875,253 So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.
- dorgo 5y ago
  >So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points. Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    Eventually you choose "Sign-in with Google"
- zerocrates 5y ago
  The compression of the top end of the ranking among active/once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it's probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1/4 your reputation but that's still good for "top 0.91% overall". I have a similar experience though, I haven't been active for many years, and have a handful of very simple answers to common problems that still make the reputation graph pretty linear.
- 5y ago
tamrix 5y ago
Except no pay out for you. Maybe the next big site should be backed by crypto or something with token rewards so you make something by building the sure with content?
k__ 5y ago
Microsoft has GitHub and I have to admit, I look more into OSS code than I search something on StackOverflow nowadays.
astrojams 5y ago
I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that question got really popular and now I'm in the top 34% ranking of folks on the Math site. I don't really know a lot about math but people really like the TREE(3) function.
ryanSrich 5y ago
I'm top 4% and I haven't posted on the site in over 2 years. Every time I log back in though I see I have 100s of new points or whatever they call it.
Qem 5y ago
*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you're the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you're bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There's diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358 https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358
olalonde 5y ago
Same, I'm "top 0.20% overall" on askubuntu.com because of some simple questions I asked in 2010 (inactive since).
pugworthy 5y ago
And a nice reminder of being an early poster to popular things.
ineedasername 5y ago
Well, those internet points are at least likely to be harder currency than the highly inflationary retweets, upvotes, or likes.
journey_16162 5y ago
I'm a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.
habosa 5y ago
Owning both GitHub and StackOverflow would be one hell of a combo for Microsoft. They'd really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.

by dested 5y ago

caturopath 5y ago

I played Stack Overflow years ago and have a ~0.3% ranked account, despite not really posting in years. It's amazing how little the ranking seems to have changed in the last 10 years, wavering around in the top half percent whenever I've peeked. I don't know whether the number is dishonest, or whether the new stars and new signups just happen to hold it in status, never sending it to 0.03% or 3%.

jrockway 5y ago
Same. I think what happened is that the early users answered all the most frequently occurring questions, and the questions honestly haven't changed much. I think my most popular answer is like how to diff with git. People are using git even more than they were when SO started, so it gets upvoted regularly.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  Some of my oldest answers have hundreds of votes and required minimal effort to answer well... some of the newer answers have less than ten votes, since they're much more niche (even if they take 10x the effort to answer well). A lot of the early broad answers got those huge upvote counts and make the early users who answered them stay in the top percentiles.
- caturopath 5y ago
  Yeah, the continued upvotes for the same old questions doesn't surprise me, doubly so given the nasty culture of trying your best to close all new questions. Today, if someone posts a question, it will be closed as a duplicate (whether or not it actually is), or as too broad or too narrow. My main SO contribution in the last several years has been votes to re-open, which don't tend to get enough to actually re-open. My real surprise isn't the continued flow of points, just the apparent stasis. I could imagine being at 0.003% by now, for instance, from this phenomenon.
- iSnow 5y ago
  There really should be some karma decay system to prevent early users hogging 5-figure reputation. I didn't do much there in the last 5y but I am still way up in reputation.
  - jagger27 5y ago
    I think this idea combined with the “is this answer still relevant” flag that was recently added would work well. I see no reason to devalue old but still good answers.
    - mark-r 5y ago
      Sometimes you're forced to work with older technology, and it's nice that you can still find answers to questions that many would consider obsolete. I'd hate to see a clean-up effort that makes that information go away forever.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Gradual 5 year drop-off for effective karma might do community good. As such any post older than that would have zero effective karma, but you could still show historic karma. Maybe this would make moderation better for new users as old hostile ones lose their power if they don't keep participating in the same pit as rest new userbase...
  - mark-r 5y ago
    I don't see how you can call it "hogging". Having a high reputation doesn't prevent anyone else from getting a high reputation too. For me the reputation points are a proxy for how helpful I've been to other people overall. I like being helpful. Suddenly seeing that score go down for absolutely no reason would be very disincentivizing for me.
    - iSnow 5y ago
      SO had quite some toxic moderators who came in early and dominated everything because of their 5-fig karma. It drove me away from helping out there.
chrismorgan 5y ago
Same. “Top N%” looks to just use score, and momentum on old answers is a big deal. I’m top 0.24%, with my score having increased by about 50% (25,000) in the last 3½ years (as far as their little chart shows), overwhelmingly because of momentum on old answers from 2010–2015—for during that time I’ve only made a handful of edits, three question, and six answers, three of which were for my own three questions.

munk-a 5y ago

It's surprising what sorts of things people will buy for prestige - that might be worth a good deal of money for resale when you're looking to retire.

jononor 5y ago
One could try selling answers as Non Fungible Tokens, especially if you have some wierd ones. Lots of geeks have crypto to mess around with, and might want to pay for some bragging rights. Which is the only NFTs can really hope to be good for.
- ivanche 5y ago
  Hahah, neat idea. I can't think of a more "NFT-able" answer than this one https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
dystroy 5y ago
I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.
- saalweachter 5y ago
  Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing? [0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...
  - dystroy 5y ago
    Those questions, anybody having spent time answering thousands of questions had to think about it. When you realize an SO account isn't really worth much for your brand, you may realize other benefits of your participation: the rare pleasure of really helping somebody (sometimes, not when answering trivial questions), the enjoyment you get from a very fun game (if you're into it) and the knowledge you build for yourself (I forced myself to watch some tags just because they were about technologies I didn't knew and that I wanted to learn). IMO you have to stop when it becomes boring. I stopped participating for 3 or 4 years before I learnt Rust and felt the need to see what other people were asking about the language and the approaches other people had to solve problems.

couchdb_ouchdb 5y ago

Same for me. Day 1. I'm user 25 on the site as I listened to the podcast about them making it. Just for answering a few questions early I'm in the top 0.76% overall. https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments https://stackoverflow.com/users/25/codingwithoutcomments

pan69 5y ago
I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere. Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
- swivelmaster 5y ago
  I used to listen to every episode of that while taking walks around Berkeley. I totally forgot about it until I saw this comment!
- mrweasel 5y ago
  It is still one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve listened to. Jeff and Joel completely chanced how I view hardware. So far they’ve been right in that scaling out isn’t something most of us need to worry about for a LONG time. Modern computers are insanely fast and capable of much more than we think.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    Most sites could run on a single mid range machine. Top 500 sites could run on a small cluster of less than 10 machines. You have to balance work to external egress to intracluster bandwidth while accounting for your total random IOP budget. A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
    - 867-5309 5y ago
      a CDN wouldn't go amiss either, or at least some sort of geographic mirroring

benschulz 5y ago

> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. However, I haven't gained many points during the same interval. That leads me to believe it's not about compound interest but new users joining.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JadeNB 5y ago
> I'm also in the top 7%. That's down from 12% or so from five years ago. Isn't being in the top 7% up, not down, from being only in the top 12%?
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  His point stands nonetheless. The "top n-%" contribution would also improve if the lurker userbase increases. No need for continuous up-votes of old answers
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Up in standing, but 7 is less than 12, so numerically down.
lordnacho 5y ago
Same here, also 7%. But I benefited from a recalc of the question vs answer points. You might have as well?

incanus77 5y ago

Similarly, I answered a few hundred questions some years back when I was running mobile at Mapbox and they were growing, and now I’m in the top 8% despite not doing much the past five years. Interesting.

iSnow 5y ago

It's relatively easy if you really take the time to answer questions. Around 2016, I wanted to get deeper into some tech and used the learning curve to answer SO questions. I basically stopped the same year, but I am still in the top 8%, used to be top 1% for a couple of months. Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution.

alpaca128 5y ago
> Contribution rate must be an extremely uneven distribution. Probably another case of the 1% rule[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

EMM_386 5y ago

> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site, which is a nice reminder on the power of compound interest! That's how I'm in the top 5%. My old posts that are still relevant get votes. Every time I log in there is a new notification about how many more points I have.

Macha 5y ago
Yeah, top 3% for stuff like being the first person to ask about terminal colour codes and explain typedef. Hard to see that many new questions with such broad appeal that weren't already asked or answered for any new users to get their rep as easily
surfearth 5y ago
In 2013, I asked a question that I then answered myself. It turned out to be a fairly common question and my response now has more than 101k views. It's remarkable as perhaps the lowest effort/highest benefit to others online action in my life.

TylerH 5y ago

The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1. I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.

usrusr 5y ago
After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There's an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print. This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see. Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls grow higher over time?
- bhandziuk 5y ago
  Just positively edit a few questions. You'll get rep for that. https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate from there.
  - nickysielicki 5y ago
    For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer? You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality questions and very high quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further down and finding the correct answer that has zero upvotes).

andrewljohnson 5y ago

Top 3% for me, I guess on the strength of being early in the iOS ecosystem, inactive for a decade My questions seem lame and my top answer is my own question: https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=profile https://stackoverflow.com/users/108512/andrew-johnson?tab=pr...

halfdan 5y ago
You just made me check - "top 0.84% overall". Haven't posted in a long long time and it looks like my points keep growing pretty much linearly.

throwaway894345 5y ago

It looks like GitHub Discussions is sort of filling a similar niche--I'm guessing they're banking on being able to build that out for less than $1B--since they already have GitHub, they don't benefit as much from the StackOverflow user network / brand. I think that makes sense.

zaptrem 5y ago
Easy to build out the platform, difficult to build out the knowledge base (especially since so many areas have already been covered on SO)
- gervwyk 5y ago
  I must agree, their reach must be insane! Although my last question was like 3 years ago, I do visit it at least twice a week for quick answers. I feel like most “often asked” questions has been answered. I very seldomly find that creating a new question is necessary as most things is covered in past awnsers. However for package related problems, GitHub issues has become the go to.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Sure, GH lags SO considerably on the size of the knowledge base, but I don't think that's very important since, due to the rapid pace of tech, content rapidly loses value with age (consider all of the jquery or flash content, or content pertaining to old versions of libraries or frameworks). What matters more is the rate at which content is generated, and I think GH has a pretty competitive story considering that people naturally want to ask the project maintainers/community questions directly (as evidenced by all of the GitHub Issues which are formulated as questions) and considering GitHub's significant share of those maintainers/communities. I posit that new content will increasingly appear on GH Discussions. Please don't mistake this for some exaggerated "GH is going to kill SO" argument--SO will do fine, but there is a compelling story for why MS wouldn't spend $1bn on SO.
  - palijer 5y ago
    I'd say a lot of that stuff increases with value to an individual over time, but has less demand. Some of those SO discussions are the only references to ancient legacy code that is useful, when asking any questions about it today would not get any answers. So, depending on how we calculate value, if we ignore demand, it can be more valuable.

irrational 5y ago

Ironically I was one of the first ones too but never really participated since I didn’t think the site would actually have lasting power. Never ask me to pick the winning horse. Same thing with Bitcoin. I knew about it from the first day, but never mined any since it was such a dumb idea. Face palm.

soperj 5y ago
What are some esoteric things that you think are stupid right now? Asking for a friend.
- geoduck14 5y ago
  Tesla
Loveaway 5y ago
Mined about 100 on some old Radeon. Sold them at $30, because I thought they peaked. Trying not to think about that too much:)
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Wow...crazy
tharne 5y ago
Don't be too hard on yourself, it's next to impossible to guess which things are going to be transformational and which aren't. Look at some of the early early emails from Linus Torvalds on linux. In his mind the original linux kernel was just a cool toy that other devs could play around with. He invented linux and even he never saw it becoming the OS of practically the entire internet.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  I don't think many people who do something big and attribute the success to their own foresight are being truthful.

lordnacho 5y ago

Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.

ritchiea 5y ago
I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work. On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
- mikeywazowski 5y ago
  This person has freely put in the effort to provide a solution to a problem you have at work, and you can't even be bothered to click the upvote button? Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Can't upvote on SO without spending ??? hours farming karma. People start answers with "don't have enough reputation to comment, but in response to the other answer [...]". Left the only answer on several questions, probably averaging 0.2 upvotes per answer. My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes. I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes. Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y. If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.

mythz 5y ago

> In spite of this, I am in the top 7% of accounts on the site This isn't hard since the majority of people are just browsing the site instead of contributing to it, e.g. I'm in top 0.09% from just answering support questions for our product from a minority of users who prefer asking on StackOverflow instead of our Customer Forums.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lilyball 5y ago

I don’t remember how I joined but my profile is apparently older than the official launch date according to Wikipedia? Anyway, I used it heavily for a few years, then pretty much stopped entirely in 2012. And like you I’ve continued to rack up karma, such that I’m still in the top 0.06% somehow. It’s kind of nuts.

the_only_law 5y ago

Top 7% as well, but most of that came from shitty questions (both by my own standards now and SO standards) that happened to get a little traction so I don't put much stock in the score.

make3 5y ago

(this is not compound interest.. )

make3 5y ago
compound interest is interest proportional to how much you already have. This is like fixed absolute interest. Not sure why I was downvoted.

swiley 5y ago

>You must create a new Microsoft 365 hotlive account to reply to this message.

teen 5y ago

Me too! My user id is 26 :P

goatinaboat 5y ago

I always thought Microsoft would be a natural buyer given the tech stack and Microsoft's support for developers. The heyday of SO is long over and all the serious Q+A takes place on GitHub, which MS already owns.

mschuster91 5y ago
Many repo owners close discussion that ain't bugs or feature request because of moderation workload.

tootie 5y ago

Microsoft or Salesforce. Most of the value over the past few years has shifted from general programming topics to platform-specific StackExchange communities.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

skohan 5y ago

I'm actually glad MS would not also own SO. Github has been basically fine under MS ownership so far, but it seems like we're headed into a period of massive corporate consolidation, and I'd be happy if not all the developer tools are controlled by one interested party

human 5y ago
I totally agree with you. Legislators should watch out for too much power consolidation here.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  I am not sure, if developer tools are on the watchlist of state regulators, nor am I sure, if they should be.

nanis 5y ago

Hmmmm ... Waited almost the gestation period of a human baby before I joined, mostly to raise the quality and quantity of Perl answers. Haven't been very active recently. As user 100,754, I am ranked in the top 0.12%, current #830 based on 2,139 answers and 33 questions https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/users/100754 Some of my useful answers get no upvotes: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/a/18162345/100754 And some just keep accumulating :-) https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754 https://stackoverflow.com/a/1763683/100754 Now, if you look on the ranking pages, you'll see the following table: Total Rep* Users ----------------------- 100,000+ | 1,007 50,000+ | 2,879 25,000+ | 7,533 10,000+ | 23,325 5,000+ | 50,374 3,000+ | 85,384 2,000+ | 125,638 1,000+ | 229,491 500+ | 398,573 200+ | 675,767 1+ | 14,875,253 So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points.

dorgo 5y ago
>So, the site has 14+ million users with no real activity and the percentile ranking is based on users with 200+ points. Maybe there more people like me who create an account just to do one thing. And the next time they create a new account?
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Eventually you choose "Sign-in with Google"
zerocrates 5y ago
The compression of the top end of the ranking among active/once-active users is pretty extreme (or rather, I guess it's probably more a factor of just how many people are at the low end of the scale): I have around 1/4 your reputation but that's still good for "top 0.91% overall". I have a similar experience though, I haven't been active for many years, and have a handful of very simple answers to common problems that still make the reputation graph pretty linear.
5y ago

tamrix 5y ago

Except no pay out for you. Maybe the next big site should be backed by crypto or something with token rewards so you make something by building the sure with content?

k__ 5y ago

Microsoft has GitHub and I have to admit, I look more into OSS code than I search something on StackOverflow nowadays.

astrojams 5y ago

I asked a question on math.stackexchange 8 years ago and that question got really popular and now I'm in the top 34% ranking of folks on the Math site. I don't really know a lot about math but people really like the TREE(3) function.

ryanSrich 5y ago

I'm top 4% and I haven't posted on the site in over 2 years. Every time I log back in though I see I have 100s of new points or whatever they call it.

Qem 5y ago

*power of compound interest + first mover advantage. If you're the first to ask a silly question that is a common stumbling block for beginners, you're bound to get a steady stream of reputation for life. There's diminishing returns for those arriving later, as low hanging fruit are depleted. For example, see https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358 https://stackoverflow.com/q/927358

olalonde 5y ago

Same, I'm "top 0.20% overall" on askubuntu.com because of some simple questions I asked in 2010 (inactive since).

pugworthy 5y ago

And a nice reminder of being an early poster to popular things.

ineedasername 5y ago

Well, those internet points are at least likely to be harder currency than the highly inflationary retweets, upvotes, or likes.

journey_16162 5y ago

I'm a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.

habosa 5y ago

Owning both GitHub and StackOverflow would be one hell of a combo for Microsoft. They'd really have almost the entire worldwide developer community in their hands.