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Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?

by jader201·14y ago·192 comments·view on hn ↗
I know that a lot of Hackers frequent Stack Overflow, so I am curious as to how much actual participation there is from Hackers on SO, and what the general reputation of Hackers is.

I think it would be particularly interesting to cross reference these results with the "What's Your Favorite Programming Language?" [1] poll. Unfortunately, that would require way too many options. :)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692

Note: please don't forget to vote the poll itself up if you find it valuable/interesting, in order to gather other participation.

192 comments
I participate a lot, but almost exclusively in the (HTML5) Canvas tag. Because I don't answer much else I've got a smallish reputation for a frequent visitor(12K).

I'm the top answer-er for the Canvas tag, having answered around ~10% of all questions ever asked about Canvas on StackOverflow.

I would say that reputation numbers don't necessarily measure engagement per se in S.O. very well.

I've found that if I answer a general JavaScript question, even if its an absurdly simple one, I garner more reputation in a few minutes than if I I give a detailed answer to 2-3 in depth canvas questions.

If I wanted to pad my reputation I could definitely answer more general JS questions that crop up, but I really enjoy helping people with their canvas projects, so I sorta stick to that domain and try to help with my slightly-more-unique knowledge.

Anyway, reputation numbers aren't that important to me. At the end of the day, this is the only encouragement I need:

http://i.imgur.com/POZmt.png

Could not agree more. I have the same relationship to the [floating-point] tag. It's very satisfying to help out with the detailed questions that no one else is answering, instead of trying to beat the rush to answer the silly operator-precedence questions.
> I would say that reputation numbers don't necessarily measure engagement per se in S.O. very well. I've found that if I answer a general JavaScript question, even if its an absurdly simple one, I garner more reputation in a few minutes than if I I give a detailed answer to 2-3 in depth canvas questions.

Here's why: SO points are not based on complexity or thoroughness, but based on value - value that is perceived by the community. A quick answer to an simple Javascript question may seem rudimentary to an experienced programmer, but if it has hundreds of points, the community has determined that the answer is helpful in a big way. Chances are there are many, many people that have experienced the same problem, which makes an answer to that problem - no matter how simple - incredibly valuable to the community as a whole.

Edit: This is probably obvious for SO users, but it's worth mentioning for anybody that is confused or wondering why the point system works the way it does.

Reputation points in niche tags are definitely harder won than in the popular language tags, but (as you've demonstrated) it's easier to climb to the top of a niche tag and establish yourself as an expert. The real-world reputation you gain from that is more valuable than the reputation score on the site. Great job!
I completely agree about giving in-depth answers. There's nothing I love more than an answer that relies on either a) stuff I know or can do really well; or b) a bucketload of research. Several times I've went back to answers and edited them, even after an answer has already been chosen, because good answers are way more important to me than recognition.

Completely with you on the "thank yous" being the biggest motivating factor; I wouldn't care about the site if it weren't for those. That said, if you want to get your rep up without lowering your standards, one option for the high-traffic tags is to go for bounty questions. That way, if you give good answers, you get a reward which is commensurate with your time/expertise, and you know that the asker both appreciates the complexity of their question and is very keen to have an answer.

I'm somewhat lower on the scale than yourself, but I've found that my highest rated answer is my most trivial: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/287404/using-regular-expr...
I remember the time you helped me with some canvas stuff. Thanks again. 12K is well deserved :)
I've always felt that reputation is an imperfect proxy for how helpful you've been, which is the important thing in the end. That screen shot is a much more direct measure - you should be proud of it!
I wouldn't say 12K reputation is "smallish". I have just under 6K (mainly from ruby-on-rails and google-app-engine) and according to Stack Overflow that puts me in the top 6% of users overall.
I am similar to you (just over 10k rep). Often when I answer a question, it is a tougher one that others shun away from. I may put in some real work to help the person. However, because the the level of difficulty of the question is higher, the level of understanding of the voter also needs to be higher to know if he/she should vote for the answer. Of course, there are other factors like the narrowness of applicability to a more difficult question and the time taken to even read the question if it is a longer one.
Does anyone have the same problem with SO that I do? I'm an experienced dev in some general / mature technologies, mainly the C-like languages (I know C# inside out) but essentially, nothing too specialised. Anytime I've gone on SO to try to contribute I find it hard to find questions to answer. It's either a race to answer a trivial question quickly, or an obscure - possibly badly worded or incomplete - question that can't be solved.

I therefore spend too much time F5-ing to find a new unanswered question which is time consuming in the extreme and not sustainable long term.

Is this just a phase to be worked through or do I need to continue dedicating large amounts of time? Or do I just suck and haven't yet taken the hint?

The problem with the SO reputation system is that one-sentence answers to some very basic problem end up earning you > 100 reputation, but a long, well-written answer to a niche question gets you maybe 10 or 20.

I'm not really sure what the solution to this is (it's not dissimilar to the situation here since the comment scores got hidden).

I used to participate a lot, but after having ~5 questions go unanswered or only getting shotgun answers, and seeing the general consensus be that a short answer to an easy question is worth more than a long answer to a hard question, I'm not really interested. The reputation isn't of huge interest to me, however the gamification of the site, I think, has led to it being mostly about gamification - It's infinitely easier to find my answer on IRC, reddit, or in meatspace, which should not be the case - SO should be easier than reddit and meatspace for sure.
I'm somewhere near 7. I find Stack Overflow extremely frustrating to use since I never seem to have enough reputation to do anything. If I remember correctly I can't even comment

I gave up trying to contribute and I now only leech. I wish they'd fix it because more than once I had insightful things to say but it wasn't worth the hassle.

I find participating in SO extremely annoying. Tried few times and gave up.

I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none.

In general, there's just too much reputation whoring going on. Just flipped through the list of opened questions, and I can easily answer 80% of those without thinking. But I won't, because I don't like how SO is treating me. Should they hide all scores similarly to how pg did here, I think it would make the site much more attractive for participation for people like myself.

Feel free to disagree (preferably by answering and not downvoting).

StackOverflow is one site where I never saw the appeal. I have stumbled upon it a few times through it being a top result during search, but the content seemed fairly flat, for lack of a better term.

I suppose if you have a very specific question, it gets the job done. However, in the more traditional forum model, I find the discussion that follows the answer to be far more valuable the answer itself. The StackOverflow implementation seems to discourage continuing the conversations once suitable answers are found.

It obviously works well for a lot of people, but I just don't get it. Voted do not use.

I'm one of the 83 people who have earned a silver Objective-C badge, whatever that means. Maybe I can get that on a shirt.

I was quite active on the site for about a year, and then my enthusiasm for answering questions suddenly dropped off. I don't know if the quality of questions got worse or what.

Sometimes I miss the old days of comp.lang.c++.moderated. Except the part about being a C++ programmer, that is.

I'm one of the top-rated users on StackOverflow. While I feel like my answers are high quality, I also feel like I didn't work very hard to get there.

There are days where I never log onto StackOverflow but nevertheless earn 100+ points per day. For example, a few weeks back I answered an obscure question about an unusual expression in the Linux kernel.

Someone posted it on HN and it blew up. I continue to earn "interest" on that original answer, even though I've contributed nothing of substance to it since then. (IMO, it should become harder for people to earn reputation from answers they've already given over time.)

Ultimately, I view the reputation count as something of a quasi-meaningless metric that's nevertheless a good resume booster. I like answering questions and helping people, and that's the main reason I use SO.

There is a little bit of gaming in SO that makes it hard to compete with others that are more dedicated to the site.

For example, posting a quick answer and then editing it with the answers from others to complete your answer is one I've seen. I don't believe it to be unfair just that it takes effort beyond technical skills to get high rep values in SO. John Skeet aside, he's all technical skills ;p

A little above 5k [1]. I used to be quite active in Java, Android and Python department when I was still learning a lot on those topics. Now when I'm a bit more proficient in them I usually do not have motivation to answer questions, for they mostly don't seem interesting enough to be worth the hassle. Ironically, my "best" answer [2] is related to JavaScript & jQuery - something that I don't really use all that much.

Probably the biggest problem I find with SO is the speed-typing contest that many questions introduce if they are (1) relatively simple to answer (2) posted under popular tag. I admit I am "guilty" of using this to my advantage few times, but after a while it loses its appeal. For one, it doesn't really encourage posting comprehensive and well thought answer, as you are very likely to lose the "race" this way. Although posting a simple answer fast and iterating it through edits alleviates this issue somewhat, it still feels more like a trivia contest with speed limit rather than an attempt to teach someone a small but valuable lesson.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/434799/xion [2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/8277968/434799

I find SO rather too addictive. I "played" it for a month, even got in "top 0.2%" for one of the weeks. It was tons of fun, but... no healthy balance.

Now days I still consume almost every day, but produce a bare minimum ( very similar model to US economy :) ).

I love SO, but I understand complaints about "rude" comments and lots of duplications. The thing is most people even with 10K+ ratings don't really know the subject (and got there by producing that same "duplication" instead of "closing as duplicate"), and these very people tend to be a lot ruder, since it is a "self defensive" way to a "self proof" that they really are worth something ( e.g. Psyc 101 ).

However people who really "grok it" tend to be the most helpful and fun to talk to.

Oh.. and the search. SO search sucks. I always Google my way into site:so in order to find anything.. But I guess SO knows there is Google, and does not care. Well I do! Fix it! :)

Again, SO rating mostly became a game, and since now it can also mean something on a resume (although personally I don't believe that resume itself means anything), more and more people try to game the system, and many of them winning the game. e.g. two years ago the content on SO was _really_ to the point. Now you need to click around to "find it". Two years from now... something new will emerge? :)

My reputation slowed down to a crawl after becoming a moderator.
Here's what i find annoying. There are so many StackExchange sites now. I have been participating in SO for about 2 years (15K). One tag i like to watch/answer is "machine-learning." ML questions are now spread across so many SE sites: Cross-Validated (Stats), Machine Learning, Computer Science, Computational Science", Numerical Modeling & Simulation--and more on the way, Information Retrieval, Bioinformatics, Computational Linguistics*. Because of this, SO is a lot less interesting for me. It's time consuming to track down the Questions from across all relevant Sites; about half of the questions have comments telling the OP to post elsewhere ("maybe this belongs on ....") and/or multiple votes to close.

And the worst part--as a programmer, i would much rather have the computational linguist answering ML questions on SO than on a specialist site (of which there is one). Maybe those guys benefit by becoming better programmers, but i certainly benefit from their deep knowledge of how to solve ML problems. Their answer is code, just like mine, but from an entirely different perspective, more often than not it's humbling.

More than 2k rep on SO (cool, I can edit ; ) in three months or so (one question, all the rest being answers and editing -- won a lot of +2 with my edits, before I was 2k rep). But I consider closing my account (and even behaving a bit like an ae by 'ragequitting' and purposefully destroying my most upvoted answers: I know it's bad, but I feel like I got cheated and saw my time "stolen" for me).

Overzealous mods did delete two perfectly fine answers because the question (not my answers) were offtopic. You can point out as much as you want that for SEO purposes SO explains that near-dupes are not that bad and that the time you spent answering should not be wasted by an overzealous mod (only removing value, by destroying what others created), they'll come with excuses and always refuse to admit wrongdoing.

You can criticize me as much as you want and tell me it's childish (I'm 40) to "ragequit" but I honestly feel I've been cheated by the site.

I was a well-behaving user there (still am), helping people (50 answers for one question). And then I encountered an overzealous mod not only acting like an arse using his mod power but also acting like a condescending jerk in comments.

SO I find reasonably useful - but answering questions on SO rather than getting shit done is a waste of time.

Echoing a lot of the other comments, it is easy to get a high rep by just going for the beginner questions. The easiest way to get "reputation" is by answering an opinion question or asking an opinion question. Once I realized that, I ignored reputation mine or anyone elses.

Any complex question I answer on my blog. I then answer the question on SO with a medium length excerpt pointing to my blog. I want to own my content from google's perspective and I rather get google pagerank than SO's reputation.

Oh yeah, I should add that the best SE (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/101988/should...) answer I gave in terms of upvotes made it to HN.

It was an opinion question.

A general remark that I always had and wanted to share is how easy it was to boost your reputation in the early days of SO. For instance, questions like "Best practices" for something, or what is a git stash, etc..Some questions are rather very simple and wont get you that much these days, but because somebody was the first to ask them, they got lots of points. My point is, it should have been harder to get points for asking relatively simple questions, and then gradually make it easier for people to get more points for asking questions as they dont have a choice but ask a more challenging question, thus contributing more to SO. PS: I wanted to link to some questions but they are in abundance. just think of a simple question and watch the spectacle of points.
26 rep there, 2016 karma here.

Scrolling through the thread I see a lot of people saying exactly what I was going to say about the difficulty of participation, (Can't upvote, downvote, or comment at low levels of karma) and the lack of questions that can be answered; so I won't rehash them.

I spent a few hours during the course of a week last year and got 1000 in reputation. Most of the points I got were from quickly writing answers to boring questions before someone else could get around to writing an equally good one. I did get some points from going above and beyond, or from answering questions that hadn't been answered for a long time because they were from a niche I was familiar with. I suspect that most of the people with a lot of points are treating it like a game, though.
Does anyone else think reputation "points" don't necessarily indicate the level of expertise a programmer has ? I've seen profiles of programmers on SO where they asked to vote their questions so they could receive a certain badge that is very rare to acquire. I don't think it should be like this. SO is still a great resource but I just don't agree with some of the things they do and how they do them. I can also confirm that some moderators are condescending.
I'm under 100. I love Stack Overflow, but the reason that my reputation is so low is that when I'm in software development mode, I'm usually so busy working that I don't have the time to (nor rarely think about) go back and answer some questions. Maybe one of these days when I have the time to step back and think about software development outside the context of a project, I'll go back and chip in. God knows I use it often enough every day.
There are more and more entry-level questions now, I think StackOverflow really need to provide some more advanced filters to help moderate one's question list.
I am vastly surprised there is a 100k+ user. Whoever you are, please out yourself, I'd like to (virtually) shake your hand for a job well done.
I was very active during the beta and launch, and was in the top 3 pages by rep for a while, but I became less active just because I didn't have much time. I still go on almost every day, but i just look at the featured questions on front page and maybe will answer one if it's something I know, but usually don't.

Most of my reputation points come from residual answers.

When SO first came out I was on it quite a bit but as the community grew larger, I found that I rarely added much value to answering questions beyond what other users were already doing. Now I use it as a great reference tool, like searching how to fix weird IE7 issues (yes, my company still officially supports IE7). For that, it's been a great tool.
I'm somewhere in between 'I don\'t use Stack Overflow' and 'I use Stack Overflow as a resource, but don\'t participate'. It's not that I avoid it as a resource: if I stumble upon the answer to my question at SO via Google, I'll use it. However, I can't really say I've ever actively searched the site, either.
I tried to answer some question once and it told me I needed reputation to submit an answer but it was not at all clear how I could acquire reputation to begin with. While I'm sure there's a relatively simple solution to this, I became frustrated and never looked into it further.
100k+ (159 to be precise). I've been very active for 2 years, but lately I have a little less time.

A couple of months ago I shared my SO experience in this post http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=658

I seem to be acquiring points from both spurious and cheeky comments made years ago and answers, that haven't been expected. I thank those that participate, but I don't have the inclination to dedicate myself to the cause.
Hovering at around 12.5k for a while now... SO is fun. I've only asked 2 questions, answered 592. http://stackoverflow.com/users/353988/fosco
I have just a tad under 4K points and been using SO for 3.5 years. In the beginning it was easy to ask or answer questions but now the questions are less abstract and more focused on stuff far off the beaten path.
I wish the top questions were more interesting, and not so many "what does [some random string of punctutation] do in [language of the day]?" I'm really surprised anyone finds that worthwhile ...
I tried to participate and help someone quite while back, but it wouldn't let me, so I said sod this and moved on. It usually comes up in Google results though, which is handy.
Banned for a week because someone complained to the admins because I made a comment that "Windows is not necessarily the best operating system". Gave up soon after.
Around 27000 but I haven't been actively participating since I've 20000, it's still an awesome site but one day I just simply lost interest in participating.
~16.5k, mostly from Ruby where I'm currently #10 in the All Time answers list (and accordingly also the 10th user to get the gold Ruby badge).
458. Generally been pair programming but always consider stack for advice. I'd be interested in setting time to helping others there.
"1-100", but then "100-1000". And if my reputation is 1000, shall I vote for "100-1000" or "1000-2500"? ;)