Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

"In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (Well, that's not true. When my score went over 10,000 I tried out the moderator powers for a couple of edits, just to test them out.) Over one third of my reputation was "earned" from me doing absolutely nothing for over two years."

So what? Apparently his answers were valuable enough and saved the time (and nerves) of many programmers who faced similar obstacles as original posters...

It seems only right to me that a great answer, a canonical answer, like - say - this one: http://stackoverflow.com/a/101561/168719 - can be fuelling its author's reputation long after it was written. Because it holds some universal value, unlike (say) a solution to a short-lived problem with NetBeans 6.1.

"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.

Now that's just horrible, somebody better stop this madness quick!

(I can't help but read his rant in Sheldon Cooper's voice ;) )

>"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

Data: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/edit/15710...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

EDIT: Here's a better distribution of users' reputations: http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/90233/repu....

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.

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.

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

Ironically, the question you linked to is exactly the kind that gets closed so often on StackOverflow as being "not a real question" or some such. Thankfully, when they close something it doesn't get deleted.

They do delete worthless questions, spam questions etc.

The example may be a bit off, I didn't put much effort into finding one (I just searched for questions tagged with design-patterns, since this is a relatively "timeless" subject, and I picked one with a highly-rated answer), so I surely could've chosen a better one, my point still stands I believe

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