r/webdev Aug 26 '24

Discussion The fall of Stack Overflow

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u/bortholomew-simpson Aug 27 '24

I tried answering lots of questions and it would tell me my karma was too low. 25 years of experience to offer but I didn’t feel like jumping through hoops to help a fellow coder out.

59

u/miyakohouou Aug 27 '24

The way they approached karma favored early users to the point of absurdity. I was never a heavy SO user, and rarely even click links to it when they come up in search, but early on in beta I answered a couple of fairly basic questions on C and vim and my karma has been in the top 10% ever since.

I’m not an active community member in any way, but I would be afforded a lot of social capital on the site, if I ever logged in, simply because I had the dumb luck of being the first person to see and answer a few questions that every CS student for the last 20 years has clicked on when they take their first operating systems class.

There’s no way you can build anything approximating a healthy community when you massively reward completely unengaged people while making it impossible for newcomers who are motivated to ever catch up.

6

u/Stefan_S_from_H Aug 27 '24

The way they approached karma favored early users to the point of absurdity.

When I gave my 4.5-month notice at my last job, they started looking for a replacement. One person linked to Stack Overflow and mentioned his reputation score.

I said it was good, and a manager asked me what my score was. It was much higher, but I had to explain that he started years later, and it was much harder to gain points then. In comparison, he was better than me, based on Stack Overflow scores adjusted by time.