It's also very much about timing. If you happen to write a popular answer at the time when interest in some particular tech is high for whatever reason, that gets a lot of views and upvotes early on. And once it has those upvotes, people looking for related answers later are more likely to stumble onto it.

I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess, depending on your outlook): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if that answer was written today.

And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using regex to parse HTML.

I'm chuckling at the idea that you could have possibly misinterpreted that post.

"No, int_19h, he said to NOT use regex to parse HTML!"

int_19h: wạ͈ͣ̿i̘̱͚̝̍̎ṱ̜̙ͯ̏̾̐̃ͮ,̿̑̓̒̇̄ ͈̺̯͙̰ͦ̐̎̂w̜̦̱͇̝͂̐̈́̄ͅh͚̞̯̰͑͑̐̋ͪa̩͕͑̂̒̔t̪̬̱̞̞̹͌̿́̆̑ͮͮ?͕̮͒̊̃͒̊̈

/s

Yeah, the reputation model is nowhere near representative of the significance of your contribution. Just try not to take it overly seriously...

I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.

You're exactly where you should be. Reputation isn't an assessment of skill or knowledge, it's how useful you are/were to the site (as you state, contribution), and the site needs questions as well as answers. The person with 1000 reputation purely from asking questions is no less deserving of that score than the person that got the same score purely for answering some.

It's probably better to think of the points as something akin to money paid out by mechanical turk for doing things the site needs, including cleanup and formatting in some cases. At that point, your contribution and what it means is fairly clear.

> it's how useful you are/were to the site

One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

Another person occasionally asks and answers a few questions, reaching 2000 reputation, but does a lot of editing work, triages new posts, fixes up tag pages etc.

Who has been more useful to the site?

> One person asks a single naive question once: "How do I undo the most recent local commit with GIT", gets 200,000 reputation.

I imagine the person that asked the question about git was the first to ask. There's a benefit to being the first, or asking unique questions. The value of the first time that was asked and answered usefully on SO is vastly greater than the 100th time, and the value of having it at one time compared to a year later is also great. Sometimes what matters is how it's asked, so it looks like other people's questions.

> Another person answers 100 complex, delicate questions useful to high-performance computation underlying widely-available cloud services; gets an average score of 5, has 5000 reputation.

I would guess those complex and delicate questions didn't help a lot of people, or they would have upvoted, right? Whether that's because people didn't see them or it's so esoteric as to not really help many people, the result is the same.

> Who has been more useful to the site?

The person who asked a question that got a useful answer first, or that answered a question usefully first, is greater.

Stack Overflow would be a pretty shit site if the first time someone answered that git question was in 2021 and not a decade or more ago, so optimizing for people identifying, asking and answering unique questions that match the questions other people have and are easily identified when people search for that problem makes sense IMO.

In the mechanical turk metaphor, you're willing to pay a lot for someone to take out your overflowing smelly trash because that's what you need, but you're not willing to pay as much for someone to do the same thing a day later if it's not even half full and doesn't smell. You reward people more for doing the things you need.

The person who asked the naive question that a million other new git users will have at some time or another.

If that person hadn't asked the question, any number of other people would have asked it, probably a couple of days later.

And then they would have gotten the rep

They're fake points that don't matter

I like their approximate people reached metric. I've answered at lot of VBA questions which get a lot of views but not necessarily from developers who might have an account. I suspect they are mostly anonymous users and thus the answers get a lot of views but relatively few votes.

I've looked at the 'people reached' metric and wondered: does this mean that, objectively speaking, the greatest impact I'll have on the world will turn out to have been a few stackoverflow answers?

Also, if these answers contained any code, it might end up the most used code you've ever written.

Out of curiosity I've done code searches on identifying substrings and found code from my stackoverflow answers all over the place, though of course the hits tend to be in that long tail of seldom used code out there. Pretty sure my most used code would be in deliberate open source contributions.

I'm in the top 3%, joined in 2010, it's mostly all from questions though. I only posted 8 answers, vs 83 questions. When I joined I remember allot of the issues I came across has no answers, so I guess with the years to come lots of others had the same issues/questions. At the time I thought it was just me, everyone else seems to know so much. Guess we all start at the bottom at some point.