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I recently reached a milestone on Stack Overflow. I have answered 300 questions (and most are answered correctly 😋) on the [accessibility] tag.
It...
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Let's see the user with the most answers in the CSS tag ... Oh, it's me 😋 ... there is 2000 answers of difference with the second user 😲 (I am spending too much time there ..)
I am also the second most hated user in the site (the second one with the most duplicate closure and the most accurate one: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverfl...)
I am not surprised you dominate the CSS tag. Quite an eye opener isn’t it! I will go have a play with that query you linked as looks interesting! ❤️
What is more telling is looking at the 2020 results for you - 1400 vs 400 second place, not a wonder you are at the 0.01% club! 🤣
First of all, congratulations! It requires consistency and commitment to do this. Great job!
I don't have that much to show off, but with your permission I'm doing a bit of promotion. In my case, I follow many different tags and I don't have much time to spend on Stack Overflow, so it was frustrating that much of it I was just looking for a question that interested me or that at least I was able to answer.
For that reason, I made Answerable a recommendation system for Stack Overflow unanswered questions. It mainly uses the Stack Exchange API and the Stack Overflow RSS feeds, but I'm sure I'll find how to use the data.stackexchange site you just discovered me!
It is a young project and even though it's already functional (and I use every day) there's plenty of room for improvement and contributions! So if anyone is interested, give it a star, submit some feedback, check the contributing guidelines or upvote it on Stack Apps. 😄
Recommendation system for Stack Overflow unanswered questions
I like the concept and don't worry about promoting it, it will surely help some important questions get answered and I think it is a great idea!
When I get chance I will have a proper look at the project (it may be weeks with how things are at my side at the moment but it is on my list so I will get to it eventually!!!) 🤣
We all have stuff to do, but fortunately the project won't run anywhere 😂 so keep it up 💪
Thanks again!
Do you prefer doing SO questions to let's say coding challenge sites like CodeWars?
There is a "Hacker Rank" aspect of StackOverflow:
... and if you add some social intelligence and borrow marketing / SEO strategies like "long tail" (finding your niche), plus you are lucky enough to find a niche that actually matches your knowledge, you can get a good reputation.
Sadly, accessibility and CSS still seemed to be some kind of niche on StackOverflow, but "programming"-ish enough not to count as off-topic. So we are lucky that gamification works in a positive way here and makes people like Graham provide helpful answers to others.
Personally I find that I don't gain much rep considering the number of answers I have given.
Especially in Accessibility. If anything the lack of rep I gain can have the opposite effect (I give a great, well thought out answer and it gets 15 views and no votes...I used to find it quite demoralising until I changed my perspective!)
For Accessibility last year I got (314 upvotes * 10 rep) from upvotes and (115 accepted answers * 15 rep) from accepted answers - that is only 4835 rep, on 188 answers (25ish rep per answer on average).
If I was after rep I would just answer JavaScript questions as there are plenty of ones that are low effort and it is a very active tag. (my average answer in accessibility is 800 words and takes me 15-20 minutes to write, a JS answer can be an adjustment to code that would take 2 minutes so I could do 10 answers and only need 2 of them to be accepted / 3 total upvotes to get more rep than I do now)
Hence why I go on number of answers I have given. The only thing I pay attention to nowadays from a gamification perspective is the "All time" leader board, for example if I answer 120 more questions on accessibility I will have answered more than anyone else ever, that is the only bragging right I care about (I am number 2 at the moment...I don't like being second 😋🤣🤣).
As for CSS, I can't consider that a niche at all, for Temani to dominate that takes some serious effort, 1400 answers in a year is no small feat! In fact they would probably be much better placed to talk about reputation and whether it actually motivates as they are in the top 0.01% this year.
I find the gamification on Stack Overflow is counter productive personally, I will never just look at the accepted answer and accept it, I have to look at all the other answers to find the real gems, but they probably answered an hour later than the accepted answer.
It is the "fastest finger first" element that really breaks the rep system.
It also makes people delete answers if they get downvotes (which can sometimes actually be a catalyst for a great answer, or link to an article that is perfect but be downvoted as it is a "link only answer")
I answer, primarily, for my own gain, I learn far more answering questions than any other method. I can't recommend answering questions enough as a way to grow, it shines a light on where your knowledge is weak, it lets you look past people's questions and see what they are actually trying to achieve, people will challenge you on points you are sure about and make you think again about a point etc.
Saying all that, my thought process has changed recently towards writing articles rather than answering questions, mainly because I personally will get more benefit (in terms of exposure and building a small following) and I can still benefit from the research process etc. But I will still pop on to Stack Overflow to see what I don't know!
They cover different disciplines, but I personally prefer answering questions for learning (once you have a good base in a subject).
I find coding challenge sites great for thinking about optimal solutions, answering questions good for my reasoning skills.
For example if someone says "I am doing X and want Y", there is scope there that X might not be the best solution in the first place. But there is also scope that X might be necessary due to company restrictions and so you have to work around the restrictions. There may even be scope that Y is a terrible idea in the first place. It seems to correlate more to "real world" reasoning that you need to apply to building a product or solution.
I have found there are additional benefits to answering questions, it has helped me with structuring my thoughts so that I can write more effectively for example.
I used to just do the "wall of text" answers, now I make sure to use headings to break the article down, consider my language choices so that a range of people find the answer useful, create demonstrations for more complex concepts etc.
I may be (probably am!) biased, but personally I think I learned a lot more answering questions than I ever have on challenge sites. But also consider that I answer on tags that are more subjective, [accessibility] is a "broad but shallow" subject so it may work a lot better for a subject like that than for something like [c#] where there is very likely an optimal / accepted way of doing something that is well documented.
For anyone who is interested, here is Jon Skeet's posts for 2020 on C#, the legend himself!
Glad to hear that you are enjoying your experience with Stack Overflow. I have a reasonable rep over there as well. However, some 6-8 months ago, I replied to a post not really knowing the hidden rules. I gave a better answer than someone with 30 times my reputation. Eek. That's when I discovered those issues. The guy latched onto me, and began down voting every post or reply I would make, no matter how much work I might have done to get the answer.
At first I didn't even know what down votes were until I noticed that strangely my reputation was slowly dropping and I looked into it.
The system automatically corrected some of this guys down votes, but from time to time he is able to "escape the algorithm" and I had to suck it up.
After doing the math, I realized that if he wanted me off, because I embarrassed him, he would eventually get his way. So I started looking and found here.