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Comment by dystroy | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. I'm in the top 0.07% with 300k+. Even such an account is worth nothing. Almost never did a recruiter pay attention to this. My low-rate GitHub account has a much bigger impact.

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Do you feel like a digital sharecropper[0] now that the company has sold, or are you happy what you got out of contributing?

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital-sharecropper...

Those questions, anybody having spent time answering thousands of questions had to think about it. When you realize an SO account isn't really worth much for your brand, you may realize other benefits of your participation: the rare pleasure of really helping somebody (sometimes, not when answering trivial questions), the enjoyment you get from a very fun game (if you're into it) and the knowledge you build for yourself (I forced myself to watch some tags just because they were about technologies I didn't knew and that I wanted to learn). IMO you have to stop when it becomes boring. I stopped participating for 3 or 4 years before I learnt Rust and felt the need to see what other people were asking about the language and the approaches other people had to solve problems.

> The last thing I want to do is exploit Stack Overflow users for corporate gain, even accidentally. That's horrible.

Not horrible enough to stand in the way of $1.8 Bn, though.

That’s definitely not true. I’m getting contacted by recruiters (and occasionally directly by companies, including for my current job) because of my Stack Overflow profile.

That said, my profile is very clearly linked to a real person, I don’t see how resale would even work (not that I’d consider it).

Do you feel there was a certain threshold you passed which made recruiters see your profile and start contacting you? E.g you passed 10k score or won some gold badge in some framework?

Hard to say in hindsight. I’ve been getting contacted by recruiters mentioning my SO profile for more than a decade, but I’ve also been active on Stack Overflow since the very beginning, and earned a lot of reputation very early on (and much less since). I’ve since dropped of the first page of top users (second or third now) but I can’t tell whether that’s led to a decrease in contacts (it probably has but that’s been balanced by an increase due to seniority in my field).

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