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> 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