This is the same for me, although I contributed for a while almost 10 years ago, and managed to earn just enough reputation points (that still increase a bit here and there) that I can get some ROI by asking questions and adding bounties. Two or three times they have saved me an immense amount of work trying to figure something out that otherwise might have taken weeks or I would have just given up on.
The bounty system is good for the questions you’re asking after ten years of experience.
If you can’t figure it out, then you’re asking a question with an incredibly small audience. If you’re lucky, some more internet points are just enough to make it worth someone’s while, or as it once happened to me, attract someone who was compelled to help you with the research.
This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better questions...but it took a long time to get there for all the usual reasons of not wanting to jump through those hoops or spend lots of time trolling the site. Then I did something really stupid: I had an outstanding unanswered question about a really obscure subject, and I thought well, is someone answers this they deserve a bounty, so I added one. I didn't really care about rep, and my question was hard, so I put most of my points into it. It didn't occur to me that spending most of my rep would cause my account to degrade back into noob mode; I was thinking I had earned the privelegs of a normal user and they were mine to keep.
Worst of all, my question went unanswered, and the bounty was just claimed by the system.
I haven't earned back enough reputation to be a normal user again, although I have stumbled across many SO questions/answers that could use my insight. Since I can't use the site correctly, I just leave.
I don't get much rep for answers. I get it for asking the right questions. My rep still isn't fantastic (a few hundred), but it's good enough to give a bounty when I need it.
I have a similar experience. About 10 years ago, I had some time on my hands for about 6 months, and answered a bunch of questions, with a small handful of them (3-4) getting a lot of upvotes. I haven't answered a question in years and years, but those same few questions keep getting new upvotes every month, so my progress continues to climb sort of linearly. I'm in the top 7% of contributors this year, while contributing exactly nothing new...
I read the article a while back by the chap who got headhunted based solely on his Stack rep. It made me think "heck. I'd best get started on that".
So I made a conscious effort to answer questions. I loaded up the questions list and ... nothing. Not an effing thing. All these questions from such a broad base of so many topics. I didn't know the answer to anything.
F I thought. Then a little later I asked a question that I needed an answer to... and I got points. Lots of them. And "badges". And I voted on an answer - more points and badges.
So I thought WOW I can ask my way up to 100k reputation! Fells a little like cheating doesn't it?
Then I reconsidered. Actually the 100,000 questions would be just as valuable as proof of skill, since it's all contributing to your 10,000 hours of practise (See Malcom Gladwell) - furthermore - as you contribute questions, you help build the encyclopedia of knowledge and someone else might find your answer in their "first go".
I think it's really neat that Stack is this odd sort of community where it's virtually impossible to give more than you get from it but simply by participating, even as a supplicant, you contribute to the greater good.
For example I randomly answered a question outside of my primary domain because it was a relatively easy issue that I had encountered myself. I have since earned close to 2,000 rep from that simple answer alone and get 20-50 points a week from it despite it being over 2 years old.
On the other hand answers that I spent way too much time researching have hardly attracted any points at all.
Completely agree. I'm a mid-range user but participated early on. I answered some very basic questions (how to you rotate an image in jQuery) and continue to accumulate residual reputation almost every day.
I've found that it is somewhat harder to get reputation now since a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been consumed. I still check on it from time to time and think it's a great resource.
I managed to get around 2.5k rep, but since my higher-level questions don't get enough attention, I offer bounties - losing the rep. Even if I then answer my own question, the rep remains gone. This never makes sense to me.
I used to look at SO on my morning coffee and try and answer a question or two with no incentive. However:
1. Most questions were already answered by reputation hunters with pastes from documentation when I got around to it.
2. SO started discouraging "teach the man how to fish" answers and insisting on code ready to copy/paste. I'd like to help people learn not write their code.
I did get invited to the job board thanks to Google. Some error in their android examples didn't get corrected for years and my answer on SO explaining the 'right way' to do it whored me ... checks ... what, I'm at almost 8000 points now in spite of not logging in in years.
Said job board didn't get me anything but then I never filled anything in. Maybe I had them import my linkedin, but iForget.
I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.
Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".
I consider the time that I give to the community answering questions to the best way to help. While I have no idea how to value that in dollars, it's something I put an effort into regularly.
I have 851 reputation (top 39% of all users), I have answered 15 questions, about 50% haven't received any points, a few have received a minimal amount, and two or three have received a bunch of points.
My answers are generally to quite niche topics, I have never gone out of my way to answer questions, I typically post an answer when I have invested a good chunk of time to find the solution to something and then see a question about the same issue. I sometimes see questions I could answer (or improve existing answers), but do not provide an answer as I find it hard to justify the time, I feel that if I wanted to rack up points on stackoverflow it wouldn't be that hard to post several answers a day.
My reputation has gone up pretty much steadily, for the last three years, with an average of about 3 or 4 posts per year. I am a pretty light user, and being in the top 39%, if anything, surprises me as I could easily imagine being in the top 80%.
I find stackoverflow very useful, I work in games development which is quite a broad subject, in an ideal world I'd have very in depth knowledge about hundreds of topics, but in reality stackoverflow allows me to get quick answers to a huge amount of questions/problems, which in turn gives me more time to devote on area which I feel are most important. I haven't noticed stackoverflow going down hill in the time I have used it.
this is my impression of SO too. If you want to gain reputation the most viable approach is to keep hitting F5 and answer simple questions before someone else and therefore it has become a race instead of a display of knowledge if it's reputation that you are hunting for.
I believe it wasn't as hectic about one and a half year ago when I joined.
I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep.
I _can_ provide insight.
every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can.
I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come there to sift through questions to answer.
I came looking for something. I stumbled upon something where I could provide value and was shut down because I have better things to do with my time than to jump through hoops.
It's fine for the power users who want the world to see their rep, or the people trolling for questions regarding their pet projects. It sucks for the casual user.
So, yes, in theory the rep hurdle is quite low. I've just got better things to do with my time. -- Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the first place.
There's also a lot of people karma farming (for employment reasons?). A couple of years ago I was searching for something and the same question was asked by someone else on SO and this came up repeatedly while I was looking, but after 4 years there was no answer so it was a very low quality result. A couple of days later I did find/discover an answer so I went back to SO and added my reply, miraculously after 4 years someone else added an answer about 12 minutes later, it was the same answer as mine with a little more formatting and marked themselves as correct.
So after that experience would I go to the effort of contributing back again? Maybe in this case, because the answer was shorter than this post, but the equation might change if it required more effort.
I've done it casually on various games or forums simply because when you use the communities sometimes the effort it takes to make a quick helpful comment is worth it. If you're already participating in the community then often times the notoriety of helping others is enough to keep you going. Other times I feel a slight obligation to give back to users who helped me in the first place.
I'm a little bit active as in asking questions and sometimes answering questions I google and find the solution to. Yet, 50% of my rank points comes from one answer I made soon after I created the account.
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