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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 popu

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).
    - khuey 5y ago
      Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.
      - xur17 5y ago
        Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on. This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.
        Retric 5y ago
        As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream. The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.
        xur17 5y ago
        For proof of stake, I agree - I think it's useful to instead focus on net issuance. For ETH2 this could very well could be negative since the base transaction fee will be burned, and transaction fees currently are greater than miner rewards a decent percentage of the time. Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal. For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.
        5y ago
- vmception 5y ago
  and being involved with a common question the more newbish the better
karlkatzke 5y ago
One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue. Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to. When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.
- legooolas 5y ago
  I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D
  - unhammer 5y ago
    Happens to me all the time. I'm either not automating enough things, or automating too many things. Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?
    - r-bar 5y ago
      It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
  - smrtinsert 5y ago
    If I had an dollar for searching and finding a reddit thread that I created for a question that I eventually had to find the answer to myself since somehow everyone else remembers this, I'd have at least 10 dollars. Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.

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).
  - khuey 5y ago
    Cryptocurrency doesn't have dividends or share buybacks which are what make stocks have inherent value.
    - xur17 5y ago
      Yes it does. Proof of stake networks (Ethereum, Tezos, etc) pay dividends + transaction fees to stakers, decentralized exchanges pay a cut of fees to token holders (with decent P/E ratios), and the list goes on. This is an out of date view that does not match the current reality.
      - Retric 5y ago
        As a thought exercise, suppose a proof is stake currency was only used by one person. How exactly does do it’s dividends create value? In short “crypto dividends” don’t actually create any value it’s purely incrementing an arbitrary number rather than creating an income stream. The same is true if N people use the currency without any new money coming in they can’t cash out. Therefore it’s not an actual dividend. This is why everyone calls crypto a pyramid scheme, the only way to cash out is to get someone else to buy in.
        xur17 5y ago
        For proof of stake, I agree - I think it's useful to instead focus on net issuance. For ETH2 this could very well could be negative since the base transaction fee will be burned, and transaction fees currently are greater than miner rewards a decent percentage of the time. Proof of stake coins that don't have much usage and mostly pay out rewards from new issuance have an interesting piece.. - they are inflating the base supply to pay out dividends that holders pay taxes on. Effectively moving normal gains from the capital gains bracket to regular income, which is sub-optimal. For DeX's, the image is a lot better - the biggest issue here is - are fees arbitrarily high, and will they go down over time. My gut says the percentage fee will go down, but the volume increase will more than make up for this loss.
        5y ago
vmception 5y ago
and being involved with a common question the more newbish the better

karlkatzke 5y ago

One of my funniest work experiences comes from a coworker who had a question about an obscure RHEL 5 thing long after RHEL5 should have been abolished, him googling it, and finding an answer I had posted about a decade before when RHEL5 was in beta and I had experienced and answered the same issue. Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to. When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.

legooolas 5y ago
I've had the same experience of looking up and finding an old answer from someone I knew, but one that I made _myself_ for the exact same problem I've just hit again years later... :D
- unhammer 5y ago
  Happens to me all the time. I'm either not automating enough things, or automating too many things. Btw, is there a simple way to backup all of ones own answers from across all stackexchange, in case the new owners mess everything up?
  - r-bar 5y ago
    It has been posted elsewhere, but there is a complete data dump of stackexchange on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- smrtinsert 5y ago
  If I had an dollar for searching and finding a reddit thread that I created for a question that I eventually had to find the answer to myself since somehow everyone else remembers this, I'd have at least 10 dollars. Come on brain, you remember fucking commercials.