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>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%" >OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious. It's actually a fairl

>"Indeed I went from the top 4% of contributors at my time of departure to the top 3%" >OMG, I didn't realize this issue was so serious. It's actually a fairly big jump. If you look at a distribution of Stack Exchange users[0], it follows a power law distribution, where many users have few points and a handful have a lot[1]. Once you reach the 96th percentile, it takes a fairly large jump in reputation to get to 97. If I ran Stack Exchange, this might bother me because it suggests that many high-reputation users are no longer contributing. (Otherwise, other contributors would overtake the OP as they gain after-the-fact upvotes plus upvotes from new answers.) An alternate possibility is that the OP wrote answers that are unusually long-lived, garnering enough extra upvotes to make up for his lack of posting. (All of this is not to pick on you. I just thought this was an interesting statistical point.) Finally, it looks like percentile is calculated based on users with more than 200 or something similar. Otherwise, the OP would be in the 99.9th percentile based on his rank and the total number of users. [0]: http://imgur.com/a/bfcSl http://imgur.com/a/bfcSl Data: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/157109#resultSets http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/15710... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law EDIT: Here's a better distribution of users' reputations: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/reputation-frequency-distribution http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/repu....

V-2 13y ago
This "alternate possibility" is one that came to my mind when I thought about this. Of course one could try to verify it. And anyway - now, I understand that this is beside the point you are making now; just returning to the context set by the article - let me stress that I still fail to see how this is a problem. It would be very simple to "fix" the scoring in this regard, all it takes is to disable voting in questions older than 30 days, for example. But I'm stumped on how SO would benefit from such a move. Quite the opposite - this would be an obvious incentive for repeating oneself (or others); reposting old explanations to keep on scoring points off the same know-how. Plus time-wasting fights on what is and what is not a duplicate, etc.
- alecdbrooks 13y ago
  I agree, I don't think SO would benefit from disabling voting on old questions. Don't you want to encourage people to write answers that are useful long after the fact? The only benefit would be preventing the kind of bullying the OP. It would curtail systematic downvoting of past answers out of spite. But it's an extreme response to what I understand to be a rare problem.
V-2 13y ago
By the way, this Data Explorer is very interesting, I had no idea it existed, thanks

V-2 13y ago

This "alternate possibility" is one that came to my mind when I thought about this. Of course one could try to verify it. And anyway - now, I understand that this is beside the point you are making now; just returning to the context set by the article - let me stress that I still fail to see how this is a problem. It would be very simple to "fix" the scoring in this regard, all it takes is to disable voting in questions older than 30 days, for example. But I'm stumped on how SO would benefit from such a move. Quite the opposite - this would be an obvious incentive for repeating oneself (or others); reposting old explanations to keep on scoring points off the same know-how. Plus time-wasting fights on what is and what is not a duplicate, etc.

alecdbrooks 13y ago
I agree, I don't think SO would benefit from disabling voting on old questions. Don't you want to encourage people to write answers that are useful long after the fact? The only benefit would be preventing the kind of bullying the OP. It would curtail systematic downvoting of past answers out of spite. But it's an extreme response to what I understand to be a rare problem.

V-2 13y ago

By the way, this Data Explorer is very interesting, I had no idea it existed, thanks