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The Most Reputable Stack Overflow User

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28 pointsmahnac6 comments

When Stack Overflow (SO) was new I did a lot of Java work and I quickly noticed that the best answers were from on particular guy and I remembered his name - Jon Skeet. For some time I thought he was a Java expert and only later learned that he is the author of "C# in Depth" and his specialty is really C#. It still amuses me today that even as a C# expert he probably knows more about the intricacies of Java than many Java experts.

That being said I think that Jon's exceptionally high SO reputation is not only because he is really good but also because he has earned a lot of it very fast and very early on. Unlike other platforms (HN for example) your reputation on SO still increases over time if you stop engaging or only engage lightly with the community. Given the rules stay the same as they are today I don't think it is possible for any new user to ever surpass any of the high rep early SO users like Jon, VonC, Hans Passant or Marc Gravell. I don't think the same is true for HN but I'm not entirely sure.

> Unlike other platforms (HN for example) your reputation on SO still increases over time if you stop engaging or only engage lightly with the community. Given the rules stay the same as they are today I don't think it is possible for any new user to ever surpass any of the high rep early SO users

Yeah, something like 80% of my SO karma is from a single evergreen question I asked 10 years ago.

You bring up a very interesting community design point: SO's desire to be a curated list of questions makes it increasingly hard to engage with the platform, which may eventually end up killing the community. Knowledgable people may not want to stick around patrolling new questions, if it's rare that they can actually contribute.

Yes, but I also think he has the right tone, even if the original question is stupid or badly expressed.

So his answers are good and never condescending and generally newbie friendly.

This makes him popular.

I have a feed reader on his answers and Eric Lippert's for these reasons.

> his specialty is really C#

He used to (maybe still does) work for Google and write Java. Thus, likely making him adept at both languages. C#, from what I understand, is his passion though

The question of their all time top answer is very interesting:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracti...

I loved this part:

    I only noticed this because I'm collecting questions like this in Noda 
    Time, in the form of unit tests... The test has now been changed, but 
    it just goes to show - not even historical data is safe.

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