Ask HN: How does one increase their reputation on SO | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does one increase their reputation on SO

4 pointsdpweb5 comments

Trying to kill two birds here about interesting technologies - with an experiment.

I'd like to better understand 1) Github pull requests for document editing/collab, the examples seem very interesting - and 2) what it takes to get more rep on SO.

Not "write good answers".. Everybody knows that. I'm talking about the unwritten rules that maximize the time spent in gaining points. Max the time spent helping others, if you must look at it that way. SO points is very interesting to me as a currency, they do have value and alot of expensive devs time is spent in earning them.

If you have any really smart, helpful tips please join this experiment via pull request to https://github.com/dpweb/Getting-Reputation-on-Stack-Overflow

They should be white hat, in that they don't break terms of service or game the system directly, such as create a bunch of fake acocunts and upvote your own stuff, etc..

Thx,

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> If you have any really smart, helpful tips please join this experiment via pull request to https://github.com/dpweb/Getting-Reputation-on-Stack-Overflo...

This is a classic example of self-reference -- the answer to your question is buried in your question. The way to "get more rep" on SO is to provide "really smart, helpful tips" with some steadiness and reliability. Or be funny. Or both.

It's very simple, not rocket science.

Will use another example. Getting to the front page of HN. How does one max the probability their article on the front page of HN? Submit interesting content. OK great. How do I get more traffic to my blog? Write good content. Those aren't useful answers. They're true, but everyone knows that already. Good content is a factor (among many - is my theory).

People have done (imo) pretty in-depth studies and research on the best day, time, subject lines, who submits - gives you the best probability you'll be on the front page. I'm just applying that concept to SO.

Maybe it makes absolutely no difference what day/time I post to HN. Same could be for SO, I would like to see proof before I accept that as fact. It's an experiment. Thanks for the feedback tho.

> Submit interesting content. OK great. How do I get more traffic to my blog? Write good content. Those aren't useful answers. They're true, but everyone knows that already.

Okay, but do you realize what you're saying? If you don't want to hear that you need to produce more interesting content to win readers over, then you're asking for ways to play the system -- methods that go beyond (or beneath) the traditional approaches.

> Those aren't useful answers.

Yes, for a sufficiently broad definition of "useful", one that includes, or possibly requires, cute cat pictures.

Certainly true, but there can be a gap between providing such tips and having them be accepted/upvoted. There is probably something to be said for exploring optimizing strategies, along the lines of frequenting the site at certain times, ignoring requests from brand-new accounts that aren't likely to follow through on accepting answers, and so on. Having said that, I am not sure that there is enough to be said about those strategies to be worth the time of maintaining a repo, although I always admire people who are pushing the bounds of what Git can be used for.

> Certainly true, but there can be a gap between providing such tips and having them be accepted/upvoted.

Reality tip: accepted != upvoted.

This is going to get a bit deeper than HN readers normally care about, but ask yourself what your reason is for posting -- to get upvotes, or to be helpful to other people?

Another way to look at this is that votes can be tallied and turned into a statistic, but being helpful is pretty much intangible. And the relationship between votes and helpfulness isn't strongly correlated.

In short, helpfulfulness isn't quantifiable. So it all comes down to why you post.

One more thing. Having posted in this and other fora for more than twenty years, I can report that some people only vote, and others only read for content and never vote, and the two groups are only loosely associated. I've noticed that some posts get wildly upvoted or downvoted but without many comments, other get lots of comments with few votes. This means that if your goal is to get votes, you would write in an entirely different way than if you wanted to create a productive conversation.

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