Arrrr matey, I not be havin’ no problems 'ere on the high seas.
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Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!
So I’m sure people know about the programming Q&A site Stack Overflow and its network of Q&A sites Stack Exchange. They’ve been having some community related issues lately. However, as someone who only reads the site and never asks, answers, or comments, those community issues are completely hidden.
I was moderately active on the network of sites in the earliest days. There were a lot of basic questions that weren’t asked, and I was able to ask a few. Now there is almost never a question I want to ask that has no answer already on the site, or elsewhere.
Anyway, one of those questions I asked was this one:
For non-programmers. Virtualenv is a way to contain Python packages. If you are working on different Python projects on the same computer, one of them might need v2 of a library and another might need v3. You can’t install both at once globally, so you make little containers that you activate and deactivate to switch between. Anyway, when I was new to using virtualenv 10 years ago, I learned how to activate a virtualenv, but not deactivate. The deactivate command was not documented at all. So I had to ask a Stack Overflow question to learn just the one magic word “deactivate”. Today it is documented here:
https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/userguide/#usage
Anyway, that question is a neverending fountain of reputation points on Stack Overflow. Despite the virtualenv documentation being updated, people still find my answer constantly. This gave me a very high ranking on the site despite not truly participating.
The news is that today they announced a change to the reputation calculation. It used to be that having your question upvoted got you 5 points. They increased it to 10. They retroactively recalculated the reputation of every account. That single question has 1449 upvotes as of this moment. That change gave me at least an additional 7245 reputation points just from that one question.
I now have a year rank of #5077 despite contributing nothing other than simply reading the site to find answers to already asked questions. I am in the top 0.98% of users. Maybe there is a more fundamental problem with their reputation system that isn’t solved by adjusting how many points people get for asking an upvoted question 10 years ago?
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Maybe creating a mechanized calculation for “reputation” is inherently flawed because “merit” is only tangentially connected to reputation?
Like, this is the same thing with MOBAs that track player rank based only on k/d.
I am in the opposite situation with the RPG StackExchange, in that I only answer questions.
You did participate. You were the first to ask a popular question. Rep is only really useful for showing that you are a reasonable actor on Stack. Internally it give you some Stack-specific privileges, but it doesn’t matter much.
Yes, but why am I in the top 1% THIS year largely for a question I asked 10 years ago?
Out of sheer curiosity, how high is the guy who asked how to get out of the vim he’s currently stuck in?
Math.
The one time, reputation increase for Question upvotes will distort the rankings once, also if you look at your all time rank scores you are nowhere near the top guys (833k etc.). Stack Overflow is probably the worse Stack Exchange for these sorts of metrics vs other stacks because of two things 1.A lot of super users that have insane scores and just legacy questions that continue to useful and get upvotes (the second half is you), AND 2, tons of 1 and done users that sign up for 1 question and never return. #2 is way less of an issue on the niche sites, but SO covers so many computing topics that even with the spinoffs of server fault and Computer Security and whatnot it still has incredible depth for a single SO.
Also while your score looks nice and would grant you certain edit and moderate privileges you would never win an election for an actual diamond Mod role because of the pithy amount of badges and moderate action metrics your account has. In short any hardcore SE user could look at your profile and see you just aren’t active. You get the Rep because your question is useful and brings people to the site to upvote it because they too had the same issue and googled it.
Also, even with those edit and moderation privileges you don’t think you’ve earned if you mess up someone else can revert the change and the diamonds can undo anything you might do. Major changes like closing a question require 4 other users to agree. The folksonomy works pretty well generally to correct rogue operators or simply unskilled users.
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The fact that you understand any of that is scary.
The fact that any of that even exists to be understood is the problem.
I’m overwhelmed, right now. I uninstalled some apps and cancelled some subscriptions. We’ll see what I come back to in January.
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You don’t need to understand it to use SE. You just post a question or post an answer. If you ignored the New user guide when you signed up for an account, forgot, or just don’t care other users with privileges (that start being doled out pretty low) can help course correct or moderate bad/non-compliant content. More importantly the SE UI has evolved a lot over the years and gives explainer pop-ups for why actions or statuses happened and what you as a new user can do if your question got put on hold for example. Failing that, There are always more experienced and bored people hanging out in the related chatrooms and posting on the Meta boards for each SE helping it organically move forward.
I was one of those bored people (though only moderately experienced) participating on rpg.stackexchange for a good portion of my professional career when I was waiting on server patches to install and other tasks that I needed to baby sit. Its pretty reliant and self-reinforcing. When I started the original moderators only lurked, them and wave 2 of mods are now gone and wave 3 and 4 are working fine together and upholding rpg.se quite well. The point is its distributed responsibility moderated through accountability systems and transparency that help it keep chugging along.
I like the band Airborne, but at this point I’d be surprised if their next album isn’t called “Songs about fucking”.
All the dudes on Tinder look like Republicans.
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DO you think that’s because they are republicans, or is there something about bieng on Tinder that makes a guy seem republican, like how anyone who enters an Applebees looks like the’re at least 65?
I suspect many of them aren’t Republicans but suits and crew cuts are a bad look.
- Am a woman
That’s about it. 2010 me was kinda lame, didn’t even want tattoos or to play guitar. What’ve you all got?
Call me a masochist, but I’ve taken a liking to hang in reddit’s r/outoftheloop as it is fun to see what people are talking about, from mundane internet bullshit to somewhat important stuff. I also like writing “explainer” posts and occasionally that gets me some fake internet points so that’s fun.
However, particularly on topics that are political or “political” (you know, like what color skin an actress playing Ariel is allowed to have) you get idiots replying about how “biased” your answer is. A game to play here is to look into that responder’s post history and see how many pages it takes you until you see T_D or a similar awful sub, usually marked by the yellow “quarantined” icon. Unfortunately most of the time that is already on the first page.
Wow, that’s a tricky question. One might be that I’ve finally realized my sexual orientation is basically “no white men”, but that would be something my 2010 self would likely find easily consumable. Being a Union Steward is much more rewarding than I expected, though had I the opportunity to do that in Georgia I’d have learned that there too. The only thing I can think on that may make my 2010 self lose his mind would be that I’m realistically considering running for County Commissioner, a career direction I’d never have considered back then.
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