If you’re a developer, you must have heard about Stack Overflow. Certainly, you also have pieces of code in your projects that have been copied from the answers you found there. 🙂 I’m no exception – I have used Stack Overflow for a long time. 3 years ago I even created an account, but it was practically inactive (a new user with no reputation cannot do much). But a year ago I become to be more active there. What is the effect of the year on Stack Overflow?
It depends™. There is a lot of traffic on Stack Overflow, I quickly gave up on the tracking of the PHP tag, and after some time I also resigned with other, less interesting tags. Finally, I decided to focus on questions about Yii and Composer. This was the feed, which could be tracked without much problem, but with a few interesting questions posted every week. The side-effect was the feeling of being in a niche – there were only a few active users who regularly answering on questions in these tags, and probably only 2-3 people who were involved in moderating stuff. As a result, the close votes always stuck at 1-2 votes (unless the question has a more popular tag – additional tags like a PHP or JavaScript 😀 brings more attention to the question). Also, answers could not count on a spectacular result – 1-3 points is usually max which you could expect from a good answer.
Despite that, I managed to earn about 11,000 reputation points for a year, which gave access to practically all interesting moderator tools. I answered almost 600 questions, which (at least in theory) reached nearly 300,000 people. For 4 the most interesting tags I managed to get brown badges, including a silver badge for Yii2. The result is quite satisfying considering that for most of the time I did not pay attention to any of these statistics. 🙂
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