14 ms·

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% o

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
- dstick 5y ago
  I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%. My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
    - kbenson 5y ago
      You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some. It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
      - einpoklum 5y ago
        > it's how useful you are/were to the site One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation. Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation. Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc. Who has been more useful to the site?
- haakon 5y ago
  After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.
  - lylo 5y ago
    That’s funny, so do I!
  - nargella 5y ago
    Method of Loci
    - xpe 5y ago
      Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.
- wwweston 5y ago
  The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?) Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.
  - johnmaguire 5y ago
    It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.
  - z3t4 5y ago
    High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
    - xchaotic 5y ago
      It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters
      - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
        Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
      - ThomasRedstone 5y ago
        That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity. Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant. But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.
- thefourthchime 5y ago
  Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.
- Timothycquinn 5y ago
  Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff. Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
- barelyusable 5y ago
  I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?
  - jenyay 5y ago
    You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes. [1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange
yawn 5y ago
I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool. Is there anything else out there like it? EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.
- Timothycquinn 5y ago
  With Jeff, loved the podcast. But without Jeff, not so much.
lylo 5y ago
I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed. We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)
teen 5y ago
Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is the right time for that...
city41 5y ago
I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.
tootie 5y ago
I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.
softblush 5y ago
I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top 0.02%
fredsmith42 5y ago
How much of the billion dollars will you get?
buu700 5y ago
Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users. Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
DavidSJ 5y ago
By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.
belter 5y ago
Do top contributors get compensated financially ? This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity... Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers. Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years. That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ... Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?
- warrenm 5y ago
  >Do top contributors get compensated financially Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage That's for sure There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer" ..but I've not seen or experienced it

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
dstick 5y ago
I think most of it is really down to the quality of the answers you've given combined with the vast amount of users on SO. I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%. My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously... I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some. It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.
    - einpoklum 5y ago
      > it's how useful you are/were to the site One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation. Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation. Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc. Who has been more useful to the site?
haakon 5y ago
After all these years, I still remember exact locations I walked while listening to that. Funny thing, memory.
- lylo 5y ago
  That’s funny, so do I!
- nargella 5y ago
  Method of Loci
  - xpe 5y ago
    Not quite the same as what the commenters are mentioning: an involuntary, strong association of ideas and (real) places ... still, an interesting method, which may harness the brain's ability to connect location with particular non-location thoughts.
wwweston 5y ago
The dynamic makes sense: the more popular the question, the more likely it is to get asked early on. That means early answerers will reap benefits from the popularity of the questions down the road. There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?) Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.
- johnmaguire 5y ago
  It's always interesting to see what SO posts I participated in - either as an asker or answerer - that became popular over time.
- z3t4 5y ago
  High reward for joining early is a good growth strategy.
  - xchaotic 5y ago
    It is also why crypto is having a run. Basically a Ponzi scheme that rewards early adopters
    - JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
      Yep like the stock market and the idea of money.
    - ThomasRedstone 5y ago
      That isn't how a Ponzi scheme works, a Ponzi scheme directly uses fees taken from new members to pay out older ones, lying and saying it's from actual business activity. Crypto doesn't behave any differently than the stock market (except the fundamentals are a little shakier, okay, a lot shakier).
dotancohen 5y ago
Interesting. I'm also in the top 2%, but I'm far from being an early adopter on that site, with a userId in the hundreds of thousands: https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen https://stackoverflow.com/users/343302/dotancohen I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.
- int_19h 5y ago
  There's definitely a strong compounding effect over time. I have a 6-digit UID there, but haven't been active for years now. However, I'm still in the top 0.16%, largely thanks to a steady trickle of rep from all those old answers that are still relevant. But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.
thefourthchime 5y ago
Came here to share this! What a weird and innocent time that was.
Timothycquinn 5y ago
Agreed. Having Jeff and Joel on the podcast was great and the hosts really complimented each other. However, once Jeff left, that was pretty much for me though and I tuned out after a few episodes. Just wasn't the same without Jeff. Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
barelyusable 5y ago
I'm a fan of Spolsky's writing. I haven't heard of that podcast before. I see joelonsoftware.com has some expired links. Where can I listen to this archived podcast ?
- jenyay 5y ago
  You have them on SoundCloud [1]. Note, there is a mess with numbering of episodes. [1] https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange https://soundcloud.com/stack-exchange

yawn 5y ago

I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool. Is there anything else out there like it? EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.

Timothycquinn 5y ago
With Jeff, loved the podcast. But without Jeff, not so much.

lylo 5y ago

I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed. We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)

teen 5y ago

Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn

UweSchmidt 5y ago
What's the story about the XSS vulnerability? If this is the right time for that...

city41 5y ago

I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.

tootie 5y ago

I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.

softblush 5y ago

I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top 0.02%

fredsmith42 5y ago

How much of the billion dollars will you get?

buu700 5y ago

Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users. Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

DavidSJ 5y ago

By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.

belter 5y ago

Do top contributors get compensated financially ? This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity... Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers. Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years. That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ... Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?

warrenm 5y ago
>Do top contributors get compensated financially Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage That's for sure There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer" ..but I've not seen or experienced it