
How to get Stackoverflow Reputation - codexon
http://www.codexon.com/posts/simple-tips-to-get-stackoverflow-reputation
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jasonkester
The strange thing about this is that the StackOverflow team seems to think
that people will use these reputation points for hiring decisions. They have
little widgets you can embed into your site to display your reputation, and
I've even heard them suggest that developers put it on their resumes.

I can't think of a better indicator of somebody _not_ to hire than a guy with
10,000+ reputation on _any_ community site. You can only get that sort of rep
with a 4hr+/day commitment over a period of several months.

That time is pretty much guaranteed to happen at the office. I'd hate to have
to take up the slack for one of those guys. Worse, I'd hate to have a room
full of employees spending their days gaming StackOverflow on my dime.

~~~
Encosia
I don't have time to sharpen the saw, I'm busy sawing?

~~~
cema
Not quite. We all have to study constantly. The question is how to balance
work and study.

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keyist
Out of the 6 tips provided, "write relevant, detailed answers" wasn't one of
them. Quite the contrary, in fact:

"1. Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality."

Gaming a reputation system just means you figured out how to maximize a number
determined by some arbitrary formula. Real life reputation works differently.
People aren't going to remember the dude with 10k points. They will remember
the person who guided them through one of their problems. Or the person who
consistently shows up with quality feedback under a certain topic.

By gaming the system you're only making it harder for others to use the
mechanisms the site provides for signalling quality. Fortunately most humans
have the insight to not rely solely on a number.

~~~
sireat
Tip No. 1 is a bit similar to Jeopardy strategy of ringing in the buzzer as
fast as possible and figuring out the answer afterwards.

Sadly, people will respect someone more with 10k gamed points than someone
with 1000 honest points, because we have placed implicit trust in SO ranking
system.

~~~
messel
At least we have become a little more educated about the weaknesses of the
system

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simonw
Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued
Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game
them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually
providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides
excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community
norms to keep the quality high.

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d4nt
The only advice that really worries me is the advice to downvote competing
answers. Getting votes for providing quick answers that you then refine is not
a bad thing. But I think Jeff and the team may need to prevent people who've
answered already from downvoting other answers, otherwise you could be right.

~~~
ajg1977
No, it IS a bad thing. What you get (and what happens on SO) is that certain
people will post something, anything, to new posts so they have the first
comment. They then spend the next five minutes gradually expanding their
answer either based on their own knowledge or worse of all, by cherry picking
info from other peoples answers.

This is certainly not the case with every answer, and it it may be more
prevalent under some tags than others. However it happens enough that I've
become fed-up of crafting well thought out replies just to see them
copy+pasted, with some minor word changes, into answers from first-posters.

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jrockway
Yeah, I do the downvoting thing from time to time. If there are few answers,
and I think mine is slightly better, I will downvote them so mine goes to the
top. This usually results in lots of points, since people see mine at the top
and upvote, and see the others at the bottom, and downvote them. (The same
thing works here, but I don't do it. My comments usually get upvoted anyway,
for some reason.)

The funny part is that someone "noticed" this and complained to me about it.
(There was a whole meta thread about it, which I thought was hilarious.) In
that case, though, his answers were just plain bad, and I had to downmod his
answer and answer the question myself just so that people would not be
horribly misguided by his high reputation but wrong answers.

Anyway, I hate to "game" sites like StackOverflow, but there is no incentive
not to. If I get banned, it just means people won't get my knowledge for free
anymore. I have never needed to ask a question there; I have a social network
for that (which can't be "gamed", btw).

(As to why I care about rep, I don't know. It just feels good to get a lot of
points, I guess. It's like winning the lottery, except you can't cash in
reputation for goods and services...)

~~~
asjo
_Yeah, I do the downvoting thing from time to time._ [...] _Anyway, I hate to
"game" sites like StackOverflow, but there is no incentive not to._

So why do you do it?

Your "hate" doesn't overshadow the good feeling of getting a lot of points?

~~~
jrockway
_Your "hate" doesn't overshadow the good feeling of getting a lot of points?_

Nope.

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olavk
It is a secondary issue if individual users can hack the system to gain
somewhat undeserved reputation.

The primary issue for the quality of Stackoverflow is whether good answers are
generated, and whether the best (most correct, relevant and informative)
answers float to the top. This seems to be the case AFAICT, so I don't think
this reputation gaming is a big problem for the site. (It will be a big
problem for somebody (theoretical) who hired people based on Stackoverflow
reputation. But that would be stupid anyway.)

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messel
You've exposed some systematic weaknesses of the SO quality score. If I worked
for SO I'd thank you.

My proposed solution is to manually identify X judges who represent a
nicecross section of programming backgrounds. These judges are selected by
their continued support and passion for helping programmers. Over time their
upvotes would create new quality judges in an intelligent manner.

I used a system like this for characterizing 3D shapes in the protein database
(kinase). The templates were created from known kinase chains, we called them
motifs. Thanks to Tony Sommese, and Jim Dwulit for really making it happen (I
just helped out on that project).

Another case for this model is crystal formation. Seed crystals allow for
fractal like formation of patterns in supporting media dishes.

Googles voting system also relies on "reliable" sources to help judge the
value of links.

Reference papers use citations to determine how close an author is to a
renowned scientist.

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johns
People that game the system tend to get bored after awhile and go away. Only
those that truly like answering questions and helping people stick around.
Overall, most of the time questions are getting answered and that's the
primary goal of the site.

If you're getting sniped and then having your content copied, post first or
post faster. I have never had my content stolen for another answer.

Also if you want more rep with less games, stay away from the high-profile
low-hanging fruit. Avoid basic language syntax lessons that are easy for
people to answer quickly. Pick a few tags that you have more specific
knowledge in and follow those. That's an easy way to get rep without as much
competition.

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rpcutts
This kind of BS ruins the site. I suppose it's inevitable with points based
system.

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praptak
Somewhere, a pointy haired boss exclaims "Hey, there's a site that rates
developers! Let's base our hiring decisions on that!"

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reedlaw
What's missing from this piece is an answer to why I should care about getting
Stackoverflow reputation? Besides access to the "special moderation tools", is
there any benefit to justify the time I would spend to amass more than 10,000
points? I think that the only reason someone should use a site like
Stackoverflow, or HN for that matter, is that he enjoys it. So from that
perspective, there is little incentive to "game" the system.

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michael_dorfman
The more interesting question, for me at least, is to consider what kind of
tweaks StackOverflow could make to the reputation system in order to improve
the quality of the content.

I'm a bit surprised that Atwood & Co. don't seem to be more interested in
this. (I opened a question on meta.stackoverflow.com to discuss precisely this
point, and got almost no response whatsoever....)

~~~
mattmanser
My guess is that now it's on HN they'll do something about it ;)

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saturdayplace
Huhn. I go there to ask questions, and hope people answer them. Helps me
learn. I'm not in school anymore, I don't need 'good grades.' I need to know
how to do x with y.

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clemesha
These tips describe a fairly "premeditated" approach to gaining reputation,
but like anything that yields a reward, it's just reality that people look for
optimizations.

