On hitting 100K on StackOverflow

100,000 is just another number. It's one more than 99,999. And yet, and yet. We live in a decimal cultural. We love to see those zeroes roll up. Order of magnitude baby! It's the excitement of being a child, going on a journey in the family car when the odometer reads 99994. knowing you'll see 100000. Of course everybody got distracted by the journey and next time you look at the dial it reads 100002.

Earlier this year my StackOverflow reputation passed 100,000. Like the car journey I missed the actual moment. My rep had been 99,986 when I last checked the previous evening and 100,011 the next day. Hey ho.

Reputation is a big deal on StackOverflow because it is the prime measure of contribution. As a Q&A site (not a forum - that confuses a lot of people) it needs content, it needs good questions and good answers. Reputation points are the reward for good posts. In this context good is determined democratically: people vote up good questions and good answers, and - crucially - vote down poor questions and answers. Votes are the main way of gaining reputation points: +5 for an upvoted question, +10 for an upvoted answer and +15 for an accepted answer. (There are other ways of gaining - and losing - rep) but posting is the main one.

"Reputation is a rough measurement of how much the community trusts you; it is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you’re talking about." Meta Stack Exchange FAQ

So is reputation just a way of keeping score? Nope: it is gamification but there is more to it than that. Reputation means points and what do points make? Prizes Privileges. StackOverflow is largely a self-policing community. There are full-on (elected) moderators but most moderation is actually carried out by regular SO users with sufficient rep. Somebody has asked an unclear question: once you have 50 rep you can post a comment asking for clarification. Got a user who doesn't know how to turn off the CAPSLOCK key? With 2000 rep you can just edit their post and apply sentence case. And so on.

Hmmm, so StackOverflow rewards its keenest contributors by allowing them to do chores around the site. Yes and it works. One of the big problems with forums is other users. Not griefers as such but there are a lot of low-level irritations: users who don't know how to search the site, or how to format their posts, or just generally fail to understand etiquette. Granting increasing moderation privileges at reputation milestones allows committed users to smooth away soem of those irritations.

But still, getting to 100,000 took eight years and almost 3000 answers. Was it worth it? Of course. It's nice to give back to the community. We are here to help: upvotes and accepted answers provide a nice feedback that we've succeeded. Downvotes also provide a necessary corrective (even if it is annoying when some rando dings you on an answer from five years back without leaving comment). And while there are no prizes, when you get to 100,000 you do get swag. A big box of swag:

Here is the box with a standard reference pear so you can see just how big it is.

Inside there is - a pen ....

Some stickers ....

A StackOverflow T-shirt (I have negotiated with my better half to keep this one) ...

And an over-sized coffee mug...

One more thing. There are also badges. Badges are nudges to encourage desirable behaviour such as editing posts, voting in moderator elections, reviewing posts, offering bounties, being awesome. Because let's face it, badges are cool. More badges = more flair. And who doesn't want more flair? Got flair? Heck yeah!