I'd definitely find it useful, and would pay for it. The trick is figuring out how to recruit/pay the "experts" who would need to be fairly high-value people but who would nevertheless have to make themselves available on a moment's notice.
And it had better not be implemented as one of those stupid unsolicited pop-up chat windows.
Only partially. It's a combined measure of your knowledge and participation on the site.
> As a registered user, your reputation on the site is a part of your identity on the site. It reflects, to an extent, your familiarity with the site, the amount of subject matter expertise you have and the level of respect your peers have for you.
In addition to that, it is possible to write well written, but highly specialized answers that gain few upvotes, or relatively simple answers that accrue large number of upvotes simply because it is a common question. In this sense, reputation is a measure of how 'valuable' your contribution to the site is, which is often, but not always aligned with how knowledgeable you are. There are other outliers too, like answers that get featured on Proggit or HN, but those are far less common.
(It also used to be possible to gain large amount of reputation by simply being the first to reply to a poll with a popular answer, but those type of questions are no longer acceptable).
Nope. On SO at least there are lots of folks who amassed hundreds of thousands of reputation merely for being on the site early enough to be able to answer simple and common questions like "how I can remove an array member" and the like.
Sure there are a few questions with highly voted up answers because they are widely useful, but there is certainly the minority of high rep earners. Even the new people who are gaining lots of rep are doing it by answering hundreds of questions.
...and in a lot of cases, account age. I haven't participated in Stack Overflow for years, but there's still a steady trickle of points accumulating from my mediocre questions and answers of old.
Fools aside, this is a horrible idea. There are no experts here. There are loud people, and people with friends, but no community votes up the experts, only the eloquent, or the charismatic. Einstein wasn't president, JFK was. Some occasions, that's okay, but if I'm paying actual money, it certainly isn't.
Oh FFS! This looked like a great product that seemed a natural monetization of their platform, that I would actually use and pay for. But its a fucking april fools joke connected to an eliza bot.
How funny: Just yesterday my friend (whom I met on StackOverflow months ago) mentioned that someone in the JavaScript chat channel was asking about some canvas tutorial, one that I just so happened to write. He summoned me so that the questioner could in fact, chat with an expert. (Or at least the author.)
Unfortunately the question wasn't particularly interesting and concerned an old tutorial. But I love SO because it really does let you chat with experts (Skeet being the most obvious), if not always in real time.
They could recruit their experts from the community itself, limited to those over a certain karma threshold, adding further incentive to participate.