Table of contents

Child pages

Related pages

• Reputation systems

How to gain reputation

• Monitor certain tags that you're more familiar with, and try to jump on any new question before someone else does.
  • Example: https://stackoverflow.com/unanswered/tagged/flask+or+vue.js
  • Note that it may be a good idea to submit an answer as quickly as possible, as there are generally several people monitoring tags at any given time.
• Improve question titles
  • In my experience, a lot of new SO users are bad at titling their questions.
  • It's relatively quick to improve a question's title.
  • You get +2 reputation for an approved change.
  • You'll probably only want to do this with questions about tech you're familiar with.
• Be among the first to use a new technology that is becoming more popular, and answer questions as you learn how to use it. As more people use the new technology, your answers will get a lot of upvotes.
  • I noticed this when I wrote an answer on SO about how to combine Vue.js and Flask.
• Write in-depth answers to major problems rather than one-off problems.
• Rewrite the question's title to be more descriptive, which will help more people arrive at your answer.
• Both the questions and answers can get upvotes that increase your reputation, and so you have an incentive to not wait for questions, but instead to ask questions that you already know the answer to and that you think lots of other people will also have.
  • Also. if you come across someone who has a question contains a bunch of different issues, one of which would make a good general question, then edit the title of that question to steer that person's question away from the 'goldmine' of the more-general question, and ask that question yourself.
• Most answers get very few upvotes, and so it's honestly a bit of a waste of time if you're going for a high reputation to answer those very-specific questions.

Criticisms of Stack Overflow

• Being 'early' has a big effect on your reputation.
  • Here's an example of a user with only seven questions and three answers, who hasn't posted since 2009, who has a reputation of 19,000+ because he happened to post some very-general questions that have gotten a lot of up-votes since then.
• It seems some people are overly-eager to downvote.
  • A possible way to solve this problem: have an appeals process that goes to someone who is trusted specifically for this issue, and if the downvote was incorrect, have some kind of penalty for the downvoter.

Interesting features

• Review tests / audits
  • Basically the problem was that 2k+-rep users were spamming the "Approve edit" and "Edit post" features to gain badges.
  • https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/157121/what-are-review-tests-audits-and-how-do-they-work
  • https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/276681/are-you-notified-when-you-fail-a-review-audit
  • https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/356505/why-does-the-review-queue-have-fake-questions/
  • https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/256489/is-it-really-necessary-to-test-the-attention-of-users-reviewing-edits