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Comment by jabo | Hacker News Reader

I asked a question about Redis back in 2010 and it’s now a popular question that keeps getting upvotes to this day.

I accepted one of the answers in 2010, but then over the years after gaining more experience in Redis myself (painfully might I add) I later realized that a more recent answer actually is a better solution.

So I went in recently and changed the accepted answer to the more recent and better one.

I felt weird about doing this given that rep points are involved, but between having someone lose rep points vs a larger group of people potentially going down a sub-optimal path, I chose the former. Anyone else feel weird about this?

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These are fake internet points, I don't think that warrants potentially misleading future developers.

I definitely overall agree, but on StackOverflow they aren't just fake internet points - they give you real privileges on the site

StackOverflow points are quite valuable IMHO.

I haven't used the site in almost a decade, but I posted a few extremely valuable answers back around 2010 about stuff like how to redirect a request or round a number in SQL (/s), and over the decade these stupid answers have netted me thousands of points, keeping me in the top few % of site users. As the quality has fallen off and the main focus has shifted from programming to meta-pedantry I've completely stopped using the site aside from what links Google takes me to.

The points however, are extremely valuable still. Whenever I have a tricky problem, I can post a question with a large bounty and dozens of strangers from around the world will spend countless hours of their time doing research and writing up multi-page solutions completely for free. Of course half the time the act of writing out the question makes the answer obvious, but still.

Having said that, I still think the quality of answers was better 10 years ago than it is today even with a bounty.

OMG! Those fake internet points mean people's jobs!!!!

Sorry. I feel better now.

> I felt weird about doing this given that rep points are involved, but between having someone lose rep points vs a larger group of people potentially going down a sub-optimal path, I chose the former. Anyone else feel weird about this?

Should rep points decay over time? Or accrue for the duration an answer is still relevant (for low level questions especially, the best answer might stay so forever if dealing with a specific CPU architecture for instance).

My most highly upvoted answer on SO is something from 10 years ago that I just updated with an addendum that nobody should listen to anything I had to say and should go with the other answers.

Don't they get points for having the accepted answer on a popular viewed question? So they were getting points for several years?

Asking, as not totally up to date on Stack Overflow's points awarding algo.

Yes, points are accrued over time and never go away unless the source of the points (i.e. upvotes) goes away.

so in that case despite having a solution that was lesser than the other solution they accrued a lot of points over time? Sounds like they would have nothing to feel sore about.

I think those are just fake, right. I mean 'fake Internet points'. Whatcha gonna do with those?

Same, I got in early with explaining how to do a callback. It trumps all my other answers.

I's only 2 points for an accepted answer, don't worry about it.

The recipient of the accept mark gets 15. It's 2 for the awarder.

15 is nothing though.

As the saying goes, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money."

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