
The Most Reputable Stack Overflow User - mahnac
https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
======
weinzierl
When Stack Overflow (SO) was new I did a lot of Java work and I quickly
noticed that the best answers were from on particular guy and I remembered his
name - _Jon Skeet_. For some time I thought he was a Java expert and only
later learned that he is the author of _" C# in Depth"_ and his specialty is
really C#. It still amuses me today that even as a C# expert he probably knows
more about the intricacies of Java than many Java experts.

That being said I think that Jon's exceptionally high SO reputation is not
only because he is really good but also because he has earned a lot of it very
fast and very early on. Unlike other platforms (HN for example) your
reputation on SO still increases over time if you stop engaging or only engage
lightly with the community. Given the rules stay the same as they are today I
don't think it is possible for any new user to ever surpass any of the high
rep early SO users like Jon, VonC, Hans Passant or Marc Gravell. I don't think
the same is true for HN but I'm not entirely sure.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> Unlike other platforms (HN for example) your reputation on SO still
> increases over time if you stop engaging or only engage lightly with the
> community. Given the rules stay the same as they are today I don't think it
> is possible for any new user to ever surpass any of the high rep early SO
> users

Yeah, something like 80% of my SO karma is from a single evergreen question I
asked 10 years ago.

You bring up a very interesting community design point: SO's desire to be a
curated list of questions makes it increasingly hard to engage with the
platform, which may eventually end up killing the community. Knowledgable
people may not want to stick around patrolling new questions, if it's rare
that they can actually contribute.

------
geekrax
The question of their all time top answer is very interesting:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-
subtracti...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting-
these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result/6841479#6841479)

~~~
BerislavLopac
I loved this part:

    
    
        I only noticed this because I'm collecting questions like this in Noda 
        Time, in the form of unit tests... The test has now been changed, but 
        it just goes to show - not even historical data is safe.

