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While reading the comments for Joel Coehoorn's answer to the "“You have gained power. Here’s how to use it.” kind of message" question, I started wondering - is there any data on which we can base the discussion (people reaching thresholds too fast/easy)?
E.g. is there some sort of statistics (already avialable, without needing to load a data dump) which shows # of days taken by users to reach threshold? (average, mean, std_dev, etc...)
For reasons stated below, this is probably not possible. Your main talking point is probably:
At 6:55AM PST Saturday April 3rd 2010:
0.3% of all users have 10,000 reputation
For every 1 user with 10,000 rep, there are 299 without.
Well, given 200 reputation cap a day, we can assume that it would take 50 days to get 10,000 reputation.
50 days x 200 reputation = 10,000 reputation
Given it probably takes anywhere from 1 to 3 to 5 hours to get that 200 reputation
50 days x 1 hour = 50 hours
50 days x 3 hours = 150 hours
50 days x 5 hours = 250 hours
This means that in order to get to 10,000 reputation, you probably have spent anywhere from 50 to 250 hours on the site.
While this doesn't take into account extra reputation from bounties, accepted answers, etc, it is probably still fairly accurate because as you gain reputation, you spend extra time closing, voting, etc.
In more realistic terms, you would probably have to look at the 50 more recent users to hit 10k, and see how long they have been on the site. Throw out outliers, grab 50 more, average, repeat for a while. Unfortunately, I do not have that type of energy at 6:50 AM.
Even more unfortunately, the data dump can probably not help us here. We would have to create the entire history of each user, and see how many months they had been a member at SO when they reached 10k reputation. I believe you are unable to get that data from the dump as votes and stuff like that are anonymous-ized.
Of the last 27 people who reached 10,000 reputation on Stack Overflow 22 have been members for more than 1 year and less than 2 (the profile just says "1 year"). The other 5:
I myself have been a member for 11 months and I have "only" slightly more than 5k rep. However, take a look at my reputation graph:
alt text http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/4946/captureeg.png
As you can see there are very long periods of inactivity followed by sudden spikes of activity. I believe most people are like me (except Jon Skeet).
I think it took me about five months to reach 10K. I think I joined the site some time in May 2009. It helps that distractions help me focus. ;-)
I also hit 10k in about seven months, given that I only became active last July:
I would only say that I was "making an effort" for a month or so (November); the rest of the time, I merely looked at the site when I was bored or something was compiling in the background. :)
Switch to the user's reputation tab and run:
alert(eval(document.body.innerHTML.match(/var d = (\[\[[^;]+);/)[1]).filter(
function(x){return x[1]<10000;}).length + " days");
(e.g. Jon Skeet reaches 10k in 52 days.)
Edit (Cha): You can paste this into your address bar:
javascript:alert(eval(document.body.innerHTML.match(/var d = (\[\[[^;]+);/)[1]).filter(function(x){return x[1]<10000;}).length + " days");
I just reached 10k today. I've been registered on the site for just over a year. I agree that getting there definitely takes effort.
I had some slower periods (but accelerating towards 10k) so one could definitely reach it a lot faster. I think I'll try to spend less time on the site from now on for a while.
I'm very surprised that people here talk about effort. To reach my 10k I didn't make any effort. It just... happened. And I hope that there is more people who don't try to game their level-ups, but just have them. Like this:
(source: coldattic.info)
Oh, well, I lied a bit. When I had 9 999 rep, I spent some time searching for a downvote to cancel. That was my effort to reaching 10k. :-)
I made it in 55 days. Some insight: I exceeded the 200 mark on 35 of those days. Those days required me to spend a couple of hours on the site. Most of the other days I just visited to keep the consecutive streak going.
EDIT: And we have a new record1! Colin Hebert did it in 46 days.
50 Newest Users with >= reputation
1 citation needed.
If I can offer you the perspective of a new user (two months in); I went onto SO every day in March and picked up an enthusiast badge, answered about 50 questions with upvotes on about 30, 6 accepted answers - picked up 546 rep as a result.
I reckon 10K in less than a year is very doable - but would require more committment than I have available to me (so I guess that would apply to lots of people). Personally I think I would need 18 months of logging in and answering to reach 10k, but there are almost certainly going to be gaps along the way so I'm not sure the absolute amount of time that my 18 months would need to be spread over.
I've reached 10k on Super User in about 7 months, so the considerably more active SO shouldn't be much worse.
edit: I just realised I have a fifth of that on meta. How sad is that? :D
Like others, I sometimes have very limited time to use the site. I hit 10K today (May 24). I would have hit it sooner had I:
Here's my history of using the site, which shows (like many others) lulls in use, my bounty question and the spikes from me actually having time to answer questions:
Tim Post On SO http://echoreply.us/graph.png
I think a more interesting metric is how many answers / questions it took someone to get to 10k. 10,000 answers with 1 vote each is quite a bit different than 200 answers with 50 votes each. But then again, even that's flawed if 10 of the fastest guns in the west beat you questions you could answer, and you spend just a few minutes a day on SO :)
When I use the site on a semi regular basis, I usually earn at least 1k rep per month, sometimes more.
