

Why I no longer contribute to StackOverflow - pearjuice
http://michael.richter.name/blogs/why-i-no-longer-contribute-to-stackoverflow?

======
Eiriksmal
Old.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6990570)
has all the original discussions.

The post is ~10 months old now, but still reads as if written in October of
2014.

To further solidify his points on the gamification of Stack Exchange, the
author's reputation's grown another 5,000 points since his blog post, though
his sole new contribution to the site is the addition of one small question
with 3 upvotes.

~~~
am391
Not meaning to sound snarky but it isn't this growth pattern reminiscent of a
pyramid scheme ?

Obviously I'm not suggesting SO is a pyramid scheme, but if that's how the
reputation system works surely it's an indication that it's broken
fundamentally.

~~~
sampo
A lot of time when you need to check out some detail about the syntax or
standard functions of some popular programming language, you won't start going
through the TOC of the manual, you just google it. And usually the first hit
is a SO answer. And quite often the answer is good. So why not click an
upvote, even if the answer already had some hundreds of upvotes.

So the answers that keep turning up as first hits in google searches, keep
gathering upvotes.

~~~
dan1234
Surely the simple solution there is to disable voting on answers once they
reach a certain age?

