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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.

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Once StackOverflow profiles, brief as they were, became a metric they ceased to be worth a helluva lot. Back in the early 2010s I used to include a link to my profile. I had a low 5-figure score and I had more than one interviewer impressed with my questions and answers on the site. Then came point farmers.

I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script. He would make sure to clean up an errant comma or a lingering space character at the end of your post to get credit for editing your question, thereby “contributing.”

To their early credit, I once ran for and nearly won a moderator slot. They sent a nice swag package to thank me for my contributions to the community.

> I remember one infamous user who would farm points by running your questions against some grammar / formatting script.

You can only get at most 2000 rep from suggested edits.

After you get 2000 rep, your edits aren't "suggested" anymore and require no review... and you don't get any rep for doing them.

I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.

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