From "6 Simple Tips to Get Stackoverflow Reputation Fast" at codexon.com:
Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality.
Use Downvotes and Comments Strategically
Use obnoxious in-your-face formatting and lists.
Be Aware of the 200 rep/day Limit
Edit, But Don’t Edit Too Much
Associate your other accounts
Courtesy of our pal codexon. Agree? Disagree? Walnuts? Cantaloupe?
I don't know about you but here's my strategy.
Post high quality answers. This should be numbered 1 2 and 3. But a good answer will more often than not trump a fast answer. Though there are cases where it does not.
Monitor the frontpage and the new questions list. Learn their cache time and refresh accordingly or use the tag pages (Example) to get live updates on new questions.
Set up a good but short list of Interesting and Ignored tags. For example I have css, html, jquery, javascript, mysql and php as interesting tags. This will help you see questions, which you can answer, quicker.
Avoid Wall-of-Text questions. They take way too much effort for little reward. And usually are syntax errors or bad structure.
Post an answer even if the question already has 1–2 or even 3 answers. In these cases, take your time and answer well. This will usually net you a good sum of rep.
Learn when to edit. Post a short answer at first and then edit. You have <5 minutes to make that answer shine.
Be humble, thorough and fair. There are a lot of smart people out there and many will know much more than you about the subject. Be thorough in the code you post, check it for syntax errors and make sure it fits the question. And if you see that the correct answer is already there, upvote it, that person deserves the rep.
[java] or [sql]. Watch that tag every day and answer questions if you can. There are usually fewer people on the tag and you can take more time to answer.
Post an answer even though the question has 1–2 or even 3 answers, In that case check whether already existing answer have covered all the things.Sometimes more knowledge peoples will post quickly with all the thing need to be know about that point. So in that case dont try to Duplicate it.
To be perfectly honest, I absolutely agree with #3. A bit of formatting
And #6 is also a no-brainer. Not because of the reputation but because that gives clickable names when migrating the question.
Point #1 is well discussed, just search for the fastest gun in the west problem. And Point #5 benefits the person who asks the question, because more visibility = more chance for an answer without having to post a bounty.
So only Point #2 is purely evil and should be somehow monitored and actively counterattacked, but I think that's what Jeff & Co. have been doing since almost Day 1.
But overall, I agree with these points, because nicely formatted answers from people with accounts who bump the question once in a while to give it more exposure are a Win for the site.
To further prove my point, here is a picture of a bunny with a pancake on its head:
Is it just me, or would following these tips make you feel dirty too? Is this where the word "rep whore" comes from? Especially
#2 - is highly unfair, gaming the system, and preventing its usefulness.
#1 - is true, it is the old "fastest gun in the west" problem. After the first upvote(s) I can still invest in a great answer (otherwise being pushed down and I lose my first place).
#4-6 - are great.
Am I an idealist? I would like to help and be helped. And still I find myself going after those 12 points to get edit powers at the time of writing. But at what expense? Never gonna do #2!
Well, I certainly credit all my success on Stack Overflow to
answer needs more backticks in order to be useful as an answer to the question.
<ol> stands for? Obnoxious list...
Commented
Feb 12, 2015 at 13:59
I'd add one more: answer the questions people can understand.
A question like "I'm having a problem with really really really tricky SQL query: I need to count records groupwise" will bring you 10 upvotes in a minute, if you were first to answer.
But one of the answers I'm most proud of took me something like 30 minutes and was accepted with a negative score (someone might have been using downvoting strategically, you know). There are just too many lines to be interesting.
I am formatting my answer as a list, but I have a good reason (see number 3 below):
Be the first to answer
While the fastest gun problem is not new to us, the post was written for an audience not familiar with Stack Overflow, so the OP is right in bringing it up. Being the first to answer is likely to bring you more votes. However, I disagree with his statement that there are many bad/wrong answers on top of the list because of it, my own experience is that quality floats to the top.
Use Downvotes and Comments Strategically
I don't know, most of the time I can easily see the three top answers on my screen. If a user can read them without scrolling, he/she will be very likely to do so, therefore I don't think this has a big effect. Besides, the vote difference between the first three answers is often more than two votes, so this is likely not to work at all.
The systematic downvoting of a specific user's answers, as shown in the screenshot, will definitely be caught by the system.
Use obnoxious in-your-face formatting and lists
There is a reason why answers with formatting are getting upvoted more often. It is the same reason why the option to use formatting exists: Formatted answers are good answers. The same answer in plain text is not as readable as if it was well formatted, hence the trend for answers with lists and other formatting to float to the top.
As for answers that start with a bold Yes or No at the top: If the question asks Is X a good thing to do? first giving a clear answer and then elaborating on your reasons is a good practice. These answers are upvoted because they are good answers.
Be Aware of the 200 reputation/day Limit
The reputation limit was never a problem for me, because I never got near ;-)
Edit, But Don’t Edit Too Much Editing in order to bump up the question on the home page is a strategy that is likely to work. Unfortunately.
Associate your other accounts
Hey, I did that! And you know what: I got 100 points out of it!!!!!
Once. Not such a big deal, really.
At the end I am left wondering: Most of us got to a point when we didn't consider our reputation that important any more. For me that was after I passed the 3k threshold on Stack Overflow and was allowed to vote on closing questions. (Yes, most of the people who tell others not worry about their reputation so much, because hey, it ain't that important, you know, have a reputation where it really isn't that important any more.)
Somehow, the OP doesn't seem to fall into that category.
#2 on this list "Use Downvotes and Comments Strategically" makes me rage.
I prefer Jon Skeet's advice on Answering technical questions helpfully.
There are plenty of vampiric strategies that one can employ. Those that overall don't make the site a better place to be. That don't make it a more effective place to get questions answered. I'll be talking about the ways that make the site work better.
I find that there are two general strategies to getting rep quickly:
These are tags that get a lot of questions. Which means they quickly get a lot of answers. But the former means that, if you visit the site 20 times a day, odds are you will find a few questions that you can answer which have not yet been answered.
Naturally, this requires some significant expertise in high-churn fields, so that you can not simply quickly answer questions, but do so effectively. You can expect to get 2-4 upvotes on these questions, so you don't need more than 4-6 of them daily before you hit the cap. And it doesn't even matter if a couple of others slip in; as long as you're within the first 4 minutes of the question hitting the site, you stand a good chance of getting some upvotes.
Well, assuming your answer is correct.
Maybe this tag only gets 10 questions a day. Maybe only 4 regular contributors even check the tag, let alone know how to answer them.
Being able to serve the under-served parts of SO means that you don't have to visit very often, but it also means you get a lot more accepts, rather than just upvotes. So if you combine these two strategies, the 200 rep barrier becomes less important, since accepted answer rep doesn't count against it.
Indeed, if you happen to have a lot of various obscure knowledge, serving the under-served parts of SO can get you all the rep you need. Plus, you get to help people who might otherwise have not gotten help.
The downside here is that the low-churn tags are also more likely (by volume) to be from new posters who don't know what the accept button is, or don't even have the rep to upvote. However, those few regular contributors to those tags will likely hit you with an upvote when they see your answer.
Other Tactics
There are also other tactics that you can employ in your answer. One that I do as a matter of course that just so happens to fit in is to add useful advice while answering. You should know the general idioms around a particular knowledge base and preach them where possible.
For example, if you're answering a C++ question where someone is gratuitously using new, add a suggestion to your answer that they use a stack variable. If they're talking about writing destructors, bring up the Rule of Three and smart pointers. Experienced C++ programmers will almost always upvote you for that, and you'll be helping someone find programming techniques that they may not have found otherwise.
Overkill is another tactic. If you can't be first, then by God be biggest. Go into massive detail. Lecture the person asking the question.
You can't overkill on most questions. But you don't have to. If you're in a high-churn tag, a good bit of overkill can earn you 100 rep easily. Overkill doesn't work so well in low-churn tags, since overkill relies on many people seeing the sheer massiveness of your answer.
I know first hand that #3 is a sure easy way to get more attention to your answer (and in turn more upvotes).
I always do my best to distinguish my answer from all the others by using plenty of links, quotes, formatting. Most of the time, this will shoot my question to the top of the list and ensure upvotes a plenty.
Oh, and especially pictures:
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/17/2009/07/340x_appletv_boxee.jpg
Should we really care about points all the time? I am here for:
Honestly saying, I don't give a damn about my reputation. This is not a college class where you have to score good marks for good grades or something like that.
Answer quickly but incorrectly unfortunately works. Sometimes such answers are even hastily marked as best answer.
I suggest sorting answers starting from most recently added, or sort few most recently added above others (this way each answer will be top for at least a moment).
Don't let few up/down votes affect order, at least when question is still new.
SELECT … FROM answers … ORDER BY
(CASE WHEN abs(number_of_votes) > threshold THEN number_of_votes ELSE 0 END),
(date_added > NOW() - interval '10 minutes') DESC,
…
Let me tackle these one at a time.
Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality.
Absolutely true. Like others have said, this is actually a good thing because getting a quick answer to a problem is typically what you want. The only problem is (as noted by codexon) wrong quick answers can get voted up. Or someone posts something that's irrelevant but correct and gets voted up because people don't seem to understand or don't read the OP's requirements.
Use Downvotes and Comments Strategically
I don't really like tactical downvoting. I really think downvoting shouldn't be anonymous for this and other reasons. Or as a compromise, downvotes on questions you also answer shouldn't be anonymous. This also includes putting on a downvote and later taking it off. As others have noted, if you want to rescind a downvote, you can edit the answer (with 3k+ reputation) and you're then allowed to rescind it after the normal time limit.
Use obnoxious in-your-face formatting and lists.
I don't see how "obnoxious" formatting helps. But there's definitely an advantage to using something other than a "blob" of text. You can break that up with headings, lists and/or images. It also helps to put a useful title in a link instead of just a raw URL.
Be Aware of the 200 reputation/day Limit
As I think Jon Skeet wrote, you need to get to the 200 reputation cap limit as soon as possible during the day to increase the window for over-200 reputation gains from accepted answers and bounties. I've made numerous posts against the reputation system working like this. I actually think this disadvantages more casual users. After all Jon Skeet won't spend much time during the day in the soft cap region. I read once he said that sometimes when he gets up in the morning he's already at +200 for the day (which is 6-8 hours in for him in the UK).
Edit, But Don’t Edit Too Much
True again. You don't want to make your posts CW and I have again posted numerous times how I think this owner edit forcing CW is actually a bad thing. It discourages people from maintaining their posts. I've proposed several solutions including edits after 6 not bumping the post but they've all been rejected. I think we should be doing everything we can to encourage people to maintain content they've written and updating it as the facts change.
Associate your other accounts
This is an easy one.
The only thing I'd add is that you want to judiciously bounty hunt and look for new bounties with low upvote answers. You also want to look for bounties that end late in the "reputation day" as around half the time the OP just lets the bounty lapse without selecting an answer and you know when that will be. No point wasting your time with bounties that end at 1 am UTC.
I'm not sure many bounty posters realize that the top answer only gets half the bounty by auto-acceptance. IMHO we need to encourage active selection of an answer by giving the OP a nominal reputation amount (say 10 points) for selecting an answer rather than auto-selecting.
Basically what's been said is correct. A few of the things I consider negative and should be addressed as described above.
For an eye-opening read, check out the comments on Reddit. Amusingly enough, someone chose the title of this post as Why Stack Overflow sucks. My favourite from one relix:
I've answered exactly 1 question. It was the only correct answer to that question, but it didn't get any votes and didn't get selected as the answer. Instead, the wrong answer was selected and got all the brownie points.
That was the moment I decided never to waste time on Stack Overflow again. Why even bother.
I have also written an article on Stack Overflow tips and tricks that can be viewed here:
http://sarfraznawaz.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/stackoverflow-tips-tricks-5/
The main points include:
1. Get 100 Reputation Points Free
2. Add “Interesting” & “Ignored” Tags
3. Install a Greasemonkey Script
4. Be the First to Answer a Question
5. Markdown
6. Don’t Over-Style Your Answers
7. Add Pictures
8. Use Google Effectively
9. Use JS Bin
10. Edit Your Answers Cleverly
11. Keep Your References Open
12. Involve Yourself to Earn Badges
Be the first to post a good answer. Even at the cost of quality.
~ Post a correct and helpful answer. Make it perfect afterwards.
Use Downvotes and Comments Strategically
~ This is wasted effort. Making other answers look worse doesn't make yours better.
Use obnoxious in-your-face formatting and lists wisely.
Be aware of the 200 rep/day limit
~ Gain the favor of OP. You will get additional rep for your answers being accepted even after you've hit the cap.
Edit, But Don’t Edit Too Much
~ Prefer fewer but greater edits over many minor ones. Care about those who are already reading it.
Associate your other accounts - Seriously? ... that desperate?
+ tips from my experience:
Provide additional helpful info related to the matter.
~ This might include pointing out good / bad practices, pointing out completely different (better) approaches rather than helping to fix the one included in question etc.
~ Impart the knowledge that OP as well as many future visitors will appreciate.
Help others to make their answers better, collaborate. Be generous, kind and humble.
~ Others will treat you the same way. Karma is good thing.
I've seen a user with over 1000 reputation but his writing sounded like a newbie. I looked at his profile and saw 266 questions with lots of upvotes and 11 answers with a total of one upvote.
So the strategy is to ask a LOT of easy questions on popular topics so people can answer and upvote you.
It's freaking sad but at the same time amusing that people are actually mostly hackers. We hack around the system to get what we want. I think that this is very valuable at times but dangerous at other times.
Seriously though. If you just take some of the "advice" from the linked article as it is, much harm would be done to the ecosystem.
This is missing a second part: please make sure you improve your answer after quick-posting it.
Downvote if and only if an answer is bad. Don't "strategically" downvote because the answer is competing with yours. Plus your down-vote gets locked in after 5 minutes, so the damage can't be undone unless you commit further evils.
Don't be afraid to call out on an answer that is plain wrong though, via comments and/or downvotes.
Well, I won't use the term "obnoxious" ("obnoxious" works pretty well on Meta though)
Just make sure that your post is easy to read. Use proper formatting
Don't edit at all unless you have something useful to add or something that needs to be changed. Bumping up your answer just for the sake of drawing attention bumps down other questions that might need attention more than you do.
Warning: The following contains absurd levels of snark that might be dangerous to the eyes, hands, or soul of a moderately to severely sane reader. I promise there's a point to this at the end. Maybe.
If someone has beat you to the #1 with a one-liner, follow up with some extreme #3 by repeating their answer:
Jeff's answer is absolutely correct: Walnuts do taste great with cantaloupe.
Here's a code example that explains it a bit more:
public class Walnuts extends Cantaloupe implements DeliciousCombination { }When writing walnut-related code, follow these steps:
- Determine if you need cantaloupes
- Determine if you have cantaloupes
- Eat the walnuts no matter what
Things to beware about cantaloupes:
- They are less delicious without walnuts
- They are much heavier than walnuts
- Fewer people are allergic to cantaloupes than to walnuts
walnuts.org, the official specification for walnuts, has this mostly unrelated thing to say about them:
California grows more than 99% of the country’s supply and two-thirds of the world’s walnut trade.Additional resources about walnuts and cantaloupe recipes:
Wikipedia's page on walnuts, Wikipedia's page on cantaloupe, Wikipedia's page when I clicked random article
[Note/Edit/Update/Addendum/tl;dr/Other Indication of Superfluous Footnote] You should probably get rid of the magic number on line 1000000.
You will get upvoted more than the person who answered first, and you don't even need to know the answer beforehand. As long as you have some experience in the general field and you understand what the answer is saying, you can add completely unnecessary bits and reap the benefits of another person's hard work!
But in all seriousness, I don't think this trick is always bad. You still have to put effort into your code example, lists, quotes, and finding related(ish) links. People upvote because it looks like you put more work into your answer (you might've) and because it's possible your answer is clearer to understand. Though Rule #1 says your answer will probably not get accepted.
Regarding #2, what if you hide votes for the 10 minutes or so?
By "hide", I mean: people can vote, but answers will appear to have 0 score (and time-based sort order) until the 10 minutes are up.
You could even hide timestamps and randomize display order for the initial window, though I'm not sure that would be worth it.
If I can add three more...
The highest concentration of SO fanatics (and by natural association, the FGITW's) is on the west coast of the USA, secondarily NYC. So visit the site when these regions are likely to be asleep and snipe out any questions that would otherwise get nailed in the FGITW rush. For what it's worth, Jon Skeet is in UTC+0.
If you get an accepted answer, go back and look at the tags. Then look at them again. Are they the right tags? Are all the relevant tags present? Also... On the right side of the page will be a list of 'related' questions. Check the tags on those questions to see if any are relevant towards getting your accepted answer better exposed to the community.
Lastly, defensive protection. Look at the original question carefully. Are there any improvements that can be made to prevent its closure as a duplicate? As off topic? Also, try and flesh out your answer before the FGITW's get their first caffeine hit.
I have it in mind that these are legitimate whilst simultaneously serving best community interests.
Jokes aside there is a certain flaw in the way that reputation is earned.
There are additional factors to how much reputation you'll receive by asking a question or answering one that have nothing to do with the "correctness" of the question/answer.
It helps if you answer quickly, I found that if I answer an open question a day or more after it was posted the chances of getting up voted or chosen are close to nil. People almost never up vote a question, I think it got something to do with the fact that it's hard to decide if the question is a "good" question.
And of course users that instead of learning or answering questions try to grab as much reputation as possible, I've noticed people using the same dirty tricks explained in the post (like coping an already posted answer and bumping the other question down).
Also, work in popular subject areas. Most people wouldn't recognize Jon Skeet's name if he had the ability to write swift and excellent answers in Lisp, Haskell, and Delphi, but not anything else.
Pick your questions. Only answer questions that are easy to read. If people are turned off from reading the question, they're unlikely to upvote your answer.
I think a great way to restrain this behaviour is forcing to leave a comment on downvote. I think that the downvote comment must be anonymous, for not letting people downvote only for revenge.
In this way if the reason of the downvote is not good enough, a moderator (or everyone using the voting system) can eliminate the downvote (and take measure against the user with this bad behaviour if it persist in time).
The choice of question is probably the most important point missing from the list - once you have embellished your post with enough obnoxious formatting, it's all about the number of people who see your question - the more people who see your answer, the more potential votes.
This means that the more popular the question the more upvotes, in particular:
Of course popular questions also means more competition, and so its more important than ever to make sure that you get in early - even so, more popular questions always offer a better vote-to-effort ratio in the long run.
For users who don't have a lot of experience in programming and rarely answer questions, try editing posts.
NOTE: Only suggested edits work, so if you have 2,000 or more reputation, you cannot get reputation from this.
Tips on Editing
Code Spacing: Some questions may have code that is spaced more than usual. Try to take advantage of this and space out the code so that it is properly spaced neatly. Using an online compiler is helpful.
Grammar Correction: Some people (most commonly new users) will post bad grammar. Edit that as soon as possible so that the question is good quality.
Grave Accents: Names of methods should use grave accents to open and close.
Block quotes: use the > followed by any text to block quote the entire line. This is generally used for errors.
Titles: Sometimes the title contains unnecessary words (ie. C# in a question that is tagged C#). Delete those. For unclear titles, they can be fixed.
I've seen a corollary to #5: If you're the top answerer, periodically edit the question to bring more attention and votes to your post. That way, your own answer never becomes wiki.
For the most part it seems accurate. I'm not sure you could call it gaming since this is already known tacitly condoned.
Reputation is a system that happens to motivate many people well, and it has produced great results. Coming up with strategies to maximize it while not really contributing is unfortunate, but bearable considering the advantages.
Most of the answers given here are about how to manipulate things to favor you, get more exposure for your answers, get to easy to answer questions faster and such. But I think an important tip, to maintain the integrity of the forum, is to make sure that you're knowledgeable about the subject matter you want to answer questions on. It does nobody any good if you try to answer questions with BS just so you can be first.
If you're an expert on a particular topic, your well-crafted, timely answers to difficult questions should earn you reputation, not just initially, but over time as well. After enough time, a person like this could eventually get 200 reputation a day just from residual upvotes on past answers, and that to me seems like a good position to be in. You're likely not going to achieve that with an "answer as fast as possible" strategy with low quality answers on low quality questions.
Provide a detailed analysis of the question.
Asking why the question doesn't do the preferred method.
This can be difficult to get right. If you come off as mean, people will down-vote your answer, instead of up-voting it.
Post an answer that does what the OP wants, but the way it should be done.
Specifically, not what the OP is asking.
Post multiple answers that are significantly different.
For example to the question Regular Expression to match valid dates, I posted three different answers.
1. Be the First to Answer. Even at the cost of quality.
Instead, randomize the order of the answers while the question is new. In addition, hide the up-vote/down-vote count as to not influence the other readers (i.e. lemming effect). Eventually transition the question back to normal view. The rate of activity on the question should determine the length before standard view is enabled.
I know people disagree with #2. I disagree with #1 but I know it sometimes holds true. The others seem somewhat accurate.