
Congratulations for reaching a million, Gordon Linoff - brudgers
https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/400506/congratulations-for-reaching-a-million-gordon-linoff
======
willvarfar
Impressive!

Personally, I am a few thousand places behind, but still in the top 0.2%.

How? I asked and answered a few hundred questions early on, years ago, when SO
was new and interesting...

Now those answers are old and, like most answers on SO, out of date. Usually
when I google something technical and get seemingly the exact right question
asked on SO, the answers are no longer correct. Software versions change.

And yet I still get a steady trickle of votes, forever increasing the gulf
between outdated and no-longer-participating people like me and anyone
starting on SO today.

~~~
gibolt
I'm in the top 0.2% for the year, only started in earnest less than 2 years
ago.

I got tired of always seeing outdated answers as the top, so I actively
started searching them out (JS first, then Android) and answering with the
newest variant.

I make sure to include browser/device support and update regularly.

How I wish mods could change the accepted answer (or let it be voted on like
deletion) after original question asker has dropped off the face of the earth.

~~~
mjw1007
I wonder why they can't.

SO seems to be eternally undecided about whether it's trying to be an
unconventionally structured forum, a massively multiplayer online game, or a
jointly edited database of useful information.

I wish it would put a bit more emphasis on the last one of those.

~~~
mark-r
It's simple, really - they're just trying to maximize the pageviews. If you
have to click on 5 different Google search results to get the answer you
needed, they've won. Getting the answer efficiently on the first click would
be detrimental to their revenue model.

~~~
hansvm
Wouldn't prioritizing short-term ad revenue be detrimental to the rest of
their business model?

------
codethief
> that's an average of ~22.8 answers per day, every day, for the last 3144
> days

Gordon Linoff wrote a bit about his habits here[0] but I still can't fathom
how he manages to maintain such a rate. Imagine just taking a day or two off –
you would then have to write 45 (or 68 answers) the following day. So assuming
that he _does_ take a day off every once in a while, this means on non-
vacation days his average is even higher.

[0] [https://blog.data-miners.com/2014/08/an-achievement-on-
stack...](https://blog.data-miners.com/2014/08/an-achievement-on-stack-
overflow.html) (I'm gettting an EOF / Connection Closed error in both FF and
Chrome but the Internet Archive has it cached.)

~~~
cheez
[http://blog.data-miners.com/2014/08/an-achievement-on-
stack-...](http://blog.data-miners.com/2014/08/an-achievement-on-stack-
overflow.html)

remove https

~~~
codethief
Oh, it was "HTTPS Everywhere" which kept on redirecting me to the https
version without me noticing! Thanks a lot!

------
plafl
Both him and the other "millionaire" are book authors. It makes sense: on one
hand you increase awareness and recognition of yourself and on the other you
get to know what are common questions and doubts of your potential readers and
how to explain things better.

------
bobloblaw45
>He only joined in 2012, so that's an average of ~22.8 answers per day, every
day, for the last 3144 days.

Hope that's not his real name because if it is his boss might think he needs
more work to do.

~~~
jpatte
I think he has more than enough skills to be his own boss and charge by the
hour.

------
dmortin
It's suprising somebody gives 70k answers, but asks no questions. I wonder why
that is. Does he know everything about his area and not interested in other
areas?

~~~
lordnacho
What I've found over the years is as I get more experienced, I can cobble
together whatever I want from existing SO answers plus the rest of the
internet. My volume of asks has declined enormously over the years. He might
simply already have been at that end of the experience curve when he joined.

~~~
umvi
Same for me. I only ask questions now if there is no documentation for
something or it is a bleeding edge technology.

I haven't asked a python or C++ question in probably 5 years because the
existing answers are all excellent and I can glean what I need from one or
more of them.

SO really shines once you've cleared the minimum bar in terms of computing
knowledge. From what I hear it's not super great for people that haven't
cleared the minimum bar yet (students, absolute beginners, etc.), but it's
truly a gem of the internet (I didn't use it as a student because I didn't
learn about its existence until I already graduated college - plus, it
launched when I was a sophomore in college so it really hadn't built up a good
answer base until later).

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
SO can also really shine given how it illuminates how you can rarely go deep
enough. Even after 35 years as a highly technical programmer, I still
regularly read stuff on SO and have an "oh really?" reaction over and over
again.

------
lvturner
Genuine question for Stack overflow users with high points: Aside from the
improvement in your own skills, do you find it opens any other doors for you?

~~~
mark-r
I think it got me an interview once, but nothing ever came of it. In
retrospect one of the questions I was grilled on in the interview was based on
a SO answer I had given; it was so long ago that I didn't remember the
specific point the interviewer was looking for. I didn't discover the
connection until something made me revisit the answer years later.

------
monksy
Why is this an achievement? In the past the creators of Stackoverflow have
come out and they completely devalued the points as a meaningful indicator of
comparison. (There was the global recalc and that was one of the things
mentioned in the announcement)

~~~
mark-r
In any sort of gamification there is a reward for reaching an arbitrary
threshold. It's all part of the game.

~~~
monksy
I agree with you.. however in the global recalc they intentionally ignored the
people who were taking the points seriously (for rewards and the like) and
said "well they don't matter anyways". We can't reward them for taking it
seriously, and excuse them when they claim the opposite.

