Rewriting and being on the cutting-edge are the new approach to get reputation on StackOverflow
There is a rule on the internet called the 1/9/90 rule which states that only 1% of the people in any community actively create content.
That rule seems to apply to most communities, and it also applies to StackOverflow, and maybe even to overall modern society.
Only 1% of the people in the world are artists, musicians, writers, programmers that create content for others to consume
99% of any community are supporters and consumers of products, services and creations of others and there is nothing bad about that.
There are approximately 9 million users on StackOverflow and less than 10% gained reputation by creating content, commenting and moderation. 90% of the people are just consumers and they are using the valuable knowledge created and shared by others in a trade for reputation and recognition. They are just readers of answers.
Since you are reading this article i assume you want to become a creator or gain more reputation, but there is a problem.
StackOverflow is at a content saturation point.
Now it’s very hard to contribute and gain reputation since all the easy questions and answers are not available anymore.
The opportunities for easy reputation gains are not there anymore since simple questions were answered long time ago when the community was at inception. There ain’t no more “What’s a String in C#” type of questions.
Answering or asking easy questions
Long time ago this was a viable strategy to earn reputation quickly, since the distribution of noobs vs professionals is highly skewed toward the noobs, and it was like that in the beginning too.
More than 50% of StackOverflow users are people at the beginning of their careers hungry for answers to easy questions.
Just look at this question asked in 2008:
What is the difference between 'git pull' and 'git fetch'?
The question is trivial and a Google Search would provide a decent answer.
However, the content creator got rewarded with over 9,500 up-votes and gained over 50,000 points of reputation on this single question which constitutes the majority of his reputation! This lucky dude got into top 1% with a single question!
If you asked the same question today you would get down-voted for posting a duplicate question and you would actually lose reputation :)
Answering questions that have zero answers
The most obvious strategy to gain reputation is to find and answer unanswered questions.
However, it’s not obvious that there are thousands of people online at any moment ready to answer anything that pops up. It’s a very hard competition where the fastest guy wins the up-vote most of the time.
If a question is relatively easy it will be answered in seconds.
However, there are also some questions that have zero answers and don’t get answered quickly and they are notoriously hard to answer most of the time.
Just look at this question:
These kind of questions have big bounties and rewards, but most people don’t even dare to attempt to answer these.
You could easily invest dozens of hours attempting to answer some of these questions and still fail.
Without going into more examples of simple strategies, let’s talk about the clever approach instead.
Clever strategies to gain reputation
The fact is, today you can’t go after the easy wins on StackOverflow, and if you want to grow your reputation quickly, there are a few clever strategies to achieve that:
- Rewrite existing answers (refactoring) with deep research
- Answer questions about emerging technologies
- Marketing your questions and answers :)
I used these strategies to get to the top on StackOverflow and ~ 10,000 reputation points in just 6 months at a time when there was already a high saturation of content. Just check my profile.
Rewriting Answers
As I learned in the classical book “On Writing Well”, the essence of good writing is rewriting. It happens to be the same with any text, including code, and StackOverflow answers.
The essence of good writing is rewriting
Most answers on StackOverflow have a huge opportunity for refactoring, since over time answers get old and obsolete.
Sometimes rewriting an answer to use a new feature of a programming language or a newest version of a framework does wonders and it’s a quick win of reputation points.
However, the biggest opportunity of all is the fact that most answers were written in a haste competing with others to have the lowest time-to-answer.
Probably most answers on StackOverflow were written in less than 15 minutes.
Why is that? well.. when a new questions appears on StackOverflow, there is a bunch of people online waiting to get a millisecond advantage on the first answer, since most people believe that the speed of answering new questions is the way to win reputation.
Maybe that was a viable strategy in 2008, but nowadays it’s just a waste of time most of the time.
The fast answers created a bunch of low-quality content that is an opportunity for rewriting
I applied this technique when i answered a question about the “Trampoline Pattern” in JavaScript
How to undertstand trampoline in JavaScript?
The answer was written by SLaks, one of the top 10 contributors on StackOverflow. It’s intimidating to compete with this guy right? No. His answer was not very good, and it was obviously written in 5 minutes.
I took my time and spent 1–2 hours writing a really deep answer with examples, and it really paid off big time.
My answer had 105 upvotes, which is 26x more than the original answer!
This is a proof that rewriting is certainly the key to good StackOverflow answers.
The secret sauce in rewriting existing StackOverflow answers is doing deep research
It sounds like a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding and challenging to get deep into any topic and improve existing content.
Answer questions about emerging technologies
New programming languages, technologies and tools appear all the time. Whenever a new version of React or Angular or Vue comes out there is a new opportunity to predate on questions about these new versions.
Living on the cutting-edge is a great strategy to earn reputation in StackOverflow, and to be fair it’s also the most fun strategy of all, since you also get time to experiment and learn a new technology, but also to get a validation of your knowledge from the community.
I used this strategy to rewrite an answer in the C# 6 category.
I also used the opportunity to play a little bit with C# decompilers and MSiL. I enjoyed this answer very much.
Marketing your questions and answers
A heavily under-utilised strategy to gain reputation on StackOverflow is good-old marketing of your existing content.
There are many ways to build a funnel of users to read the content you created.
The first thing to know is that most of the traffic to StackOverflow comes from Google search, so traditional SEO techniques are the best way to build a funnel to your questions and answers.
Here are some of the techniques you can use:
- Building links to your content by posting links to your questions and answers on social media (Medium, Facebook, Twitter etc.)
- Collaboration and contribution on other people blogs to link to your questions and answers
- Google advertisement for a short boost and increase in visits to your questions, even if it can get a bit expensive
- Rewriting content to appear in specific search queries on google by targeting commonly used keywords
- Posting links to your questions and answers on other questions and answers in StackOverflow
- Youtube videos that link to your content
- Sharing your questions and answers during daily work to colleagues as a way to assist in the workplace (instead of good old Slack, GitHub and other channels). Whenever a colleague needs help, you link to your answer on StackOverflow and ask for an up-vote.
- Adding your profile to sites like Linked-in
These are just some ideas to get you started, but i believe you can come up with many ideas. Just make sure to share them in the comments to this post too.
Conclusion
Yes, you can grow your reputation even if it means changing your strategy.
Be clever, apply these techniques and may the points be with you.
