Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.
There's definitely an "interest" dynamic to it, but there's also something like consuming the solutions with a good effort-to-reward ratio inside a search space early and then subsequent solutions get harder (kindof like a cryptocurrency?)
Niche questions do present an interesting opportunity, though. My highest-ranked answer was about rolling your own setInterval / setTimeout function for JavaScript implementations running on the JVM that didn't have them. Not a hot topic, but apparently a few dozen other people cared about this over the years.
Through the “asking and searching” phase, he was sitting next to me on a rooftop at a really stressful job, we were drinking daily on the job, and I had no idea why he suddenly started smacking my left arm and laughing to the point he couldn’t speak. He finally turned his laptop towards me and I just saw my StackOverflow profile with the icon I use at work and on GitHub and everywhere else, the picture of my first dog. He could have just spoken up (but I’d probably forgotten the answer) … he googled instead and got the answer of the person he was sitting next to.
When occasionally I have worked at big companies, now people know my dog’s face more than they know me as a person.
I'm user 537XXXX with an account that can't be more than 8 years old but I did spend a solid 6 months actively posting detailed solutions to problems I ran into - ~50 in total. And some more general answers. Which has amounted to ~4.900 points. Which isn't _that_ much. Just 490 upvotes. Or 10 per answer on average. Still - that puts me in the top 8%.
My guess is that the high percentage is more due to the sheer volume ;-)
I still get a steady rep trickle from a generic answer about WinRT back when Win8 was the hot new thing (or mess, depending on your outlook): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-windows... - but most upvotes there are from back when it was posted, and I doubt it would get anywhere as many if that answer was written today.
And sometimes, it's the tongue-in-cheek answers that score massive upvotes, like the famous one about using regex to parse HTML.
I got my reputation asking > 1,000 questions and answering > 1,200 , and I can't say whether I should be higher up than people with 10x less reputation than me or 2x more than me.
A well tuned monolith is a beautiful thing.
Personally, I was a latecomer to the podcast and was about a year behind the launch of SO but still in top 13 today.
I was never even very active. I can only suppose that only 1 out of every 50 signups ever accrues any real significant amount of rep.
But any such "interest" does apply to the magnitude of the initial contribution, so merely being around for long is not enough - you had to have a sufficiently productive period of activity to capitalize on.
Is there anything else out there like it?
EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.
Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.
Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.
That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...
Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?
Not from Stack Overflow / Stack Exchnage
That's for sure
There may be employers that look at your standing and say, "hey - let's toss a couple extra $K in this candidate's offer"
..but I've not seen or experienced it
We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)
Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.
