Subscribe to the feed.
I recently posted 6 Stackoverflow reputation tips here. I knew there would be some criticism, but the amount of hate was beyond my expectations. There were people threatening to have me banned including one admin.
You would think that I was the Antichrist by some of the comments I had received.
I thank Jeff for diffusing some of the negative reactions here, but I think he must have received flack for it since he came out with this statement on Twitter and did not respond to my comment on SO meta:
the gaming stack overflow user has been discussed. But at 7 months, 68 questions, and 325 answers, who is gaming who, again?
- Jeff Atwood on Twitter.
This same sentiment of Stackoverflow being the winner and me being the loser was also repeated here. It made me realize that I had not gotten the point clearly enough to them, so here I will try to re-explain my position.
1. My goal was not to destroy Stackoverflow.
When I first joined SO, I didn’t bother with reputation, and just used it purely for Q&A. But it annoyed me for a while that I couldn’t do simple things like comment or post a link. And it pissed me off that people were twisting and editing my questions and answers. So I made a goal of getting enough rep to make SO usable for me.
I thought it would be easy with all the opinionated questions that usually received 100+ votes (this was before community wiki mania). Unfortunately I was wrong, and getting points became more difficult as more people joined and used these tactics against me.
At the time I did not realize that I was the victim of these tactics, but I enjoyed getting points nevertheless. I soon realized though, that most of the people I was competing with always practiced these tactics and almost always came out ahead of me.
Since I knew my answers were better than theirs, I found nothing wrong in using their own tactics against them. This probably sounds arrogant, but it would be better for SO in the long run to have me stay instead of giving up due to frustration.
2. I did not invent these tactics.
When I started becoming active on Stackoverflow, these tactics were already in use against me. It was only after a few months of being annoyed at having my question sniped by 5-minute editors and the like that I decided to pay more attention as to why they were getting the votes and I wasn’t.
I think I’ve said this enough times: “Don’t shoot the messenger”.
3. I was not encouraging bad answers.
Nowhere did I say to make bad, irrelevant answers. I did say to be first at the cost of quality. But that is a fact of life. You don’t always have all the time you want to complete a goal, and SO puts a premium on speed.
You can always edit your answer later, but the first comer advantage is very valuable.
4. I did not lose and Stackoverflow did not lose.
I don’t understand why people are saying that Stackoverflow gamed me. It was not my intention to game Stackoverflow for the sake of gaming it. I received an admin-like account that I could use for bounties while SO received my mostly decent answers.
I used the knowledge to protect my answers, not to damage SO and fill it with spam. In fact I have received 8 upvotes and no downvotes on my old answers during these past few days because of the flood of visitors that saw my profile realized that my answers were actually good.
I would also like to note that this took around 4 months of full activity rather than the full 7 months of my account as you can see by my reputation graph. Make no mistake, if you want 10k rep, you will need to spend a sizable amount of time even with tactics.
If you take a look at the list of people around my reputation , they are usually far older with the exception of a very small few such as Alex M (who is already famous), and others who will remain unnamed that I have seen first hand uses the tactics I have detailed.
Related posts:
> because of the flood of visitors that saw my profile realized that my answers were actually good.
I agree, your answers were generally good.
I think most people objected to the tone of the article more than anything else. And the more rational SO users didn’t have a problem with the list, with the exception of #2 — tactically downvoting your peers. That is kind of .. uncool.
You are wrong, you did encourage bad answers. Particularly with your #2 technique. Downvoting other answers even if they are good, and even if the downvoting is temporary, is tantamount to discouraging good answers and encouraging bad answers.