I suspect it's due to SO's treatment of low-reputation users. For those who don't frequent SO, when you first sign up, you are severely limited in functionalit

I suspect it's due to SO's treatment of low-reputation users. For those who don't frequent SO, when you first sign up, you are severely limited in functionality. So called "privileges" are unlocked as you gain reputation. Specifically, until his rep reaches 2000 (roughly 200 upvotes to his answers), his edits need to be approved by someone who has a high enough rep. I guess the system works fairly well in preventing spam and gaming of the system. In this case, it seems to have backfired, leaving an expert feeling unwanted. BTW, his reputation on SO seems to be around 200 only [1] (around 20 upvotes altogether), which is very low. In this case, the issue is probably two-fold (and serves to highlight some of the imbalances in the reputation system). Firstly, his area of expertise / activity is less popular than the mainstream ones on SO (lua / luajit only have 5000 questions tagged collectively, which is around 100x less than C#, Java, etc). Secondly, as an expert, his answers probably cater for highly specific, difficult technical problems. These typically fly under the radar and get a handful of upvotes (unless they show something of interest to the rest of the communities, in which case a perverse upvoting cycle can happen via the popular questions list, with leading answers getting several hundreds of upvotes). Disregarding confirmation bias w.r.t. reputation (i.e. how anything one of the SO super stars says is immediately upvoted), the most popular answers seem to be ones that involve a popular language, address a common misunderstanding / lack of knowledge (usually at a trivial or fairly elementary level), and have an element of surprise to it, which makes people share the answer. As an example, JavaScript's type coercion is always popular, even though it's been discussed dozens of times: [2] These two issues, taken together, mean that you could spend an afternoon prototyping some guy's difficult problem, solving it, writing up a good answer, and getting only 3 upvotes for it. A similar thing can be said for less populated time-zones; if you're living in one, most likely the questions you are answering are not on the "first page" by the time most of the SO world wakes up / has their morning coffee. As an aside, I suspect most reputation-based systems suffer from these effects. Some of it can be seen right here on HN. Nevertheless, I guess they work slightly better than having no reputation system, as long as people aren't purposely exploiting it. [1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/1657919/mike-pall http://stackoverflow.com/users/1657919/mike-pall [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359494/does-it-matter-which-equals-operator-vs-i-use-in-javascript-comparisons http://stackoverflow.com/questions/359494/does-it-matter-whi...