Paraphrasing: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the quality of answers' Fixed: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the number of people that find an answ

Paraphrasing: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the quality of answers' Fixed: 'the SO system rewards karma based on the number of people that find an answer useful' The population of people needing answers is heavily biased towards newbies. 100% of new programmers need answers to simple questions. (And only a small fraction of them have learned how to use search Google or documentation properly.) 60% of those never move on to more advanced questions [0]. Therefore advanced questions cannot ever target more than 40% of the total user base, where basic syntax-questions target 100%. It's even worse when you consider that most of the really advanced questions that can generate the most awesome answers are never asked because the advanced users know how to teach themselves and don't need SO. [0] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...