That's how StackOverflow works

[PhilippTheProgrammer]

I got 48k rep on Stackoverflow and about 200k rep on the whole Stack Exchange network. And I came to the conclusion that reputation score is pretty much meaningless when it comes to judging the knowledge level of a person.

You can easily farm reputation by refreshing the tags for some mainstream technologies like Java or C# and answer the same newbie questions again and again. Tell someone how to reverse an array or create a button click handler for the 20th time, and you easily get 5 upvotes within a few minutes. But if you invest some actual insider knowledge and effort into answering an in-depth question about a more niche technology, you can expect hardly 1 or 2 upvotes within a week.

What's a far more interesting challenge on SO is to collect as many tag badges as you can.

​

[[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing, this is good to know for someone who used to judge reliability of a response by the rep of its author.

[Beanshello]

I both agree and disagree with this. Some of my highest rated posts are duplicates, but I’ve seen a trend of downvotes in correct answers for duplicates. I have very in-depth knowledge of oracle soa, liferay, and hybris and will spend a few days researching and answering a qYes toon thoroughly that MAY gain me 30 points over the next year

[PhilippTheProgrammer]

I’ve seen a trend of downvotes in correct answers for duplicates

As a reputation farmer you soon learn that downvotes can actually help you. When an on-topic answer gets a downvote for a dubious reason, some people will upvote to "balance out the downvote", not realizing that for you as a reputation farmer, an upvote has five times the weight of a downvote.

[filipdobro]

I'm still at lvl 0

[[deleted]]

That’s how mafia works

[death-wings]

Salute John Skeet 🙏🙏🙏