Does acquiring sufficient reputation to participate in this community get harder the longer it exists?

Question

The longer a Stack Exchange site has existed, the more questions have been asked, and had good answers given, the harder it is to find questions which are not duplicates of questions that have already been asked. I haven't been on stack exchange a terribly long time, but I've already seen a lot of questions marked as 'duplicates' because they are too similar to questions already asked. Presumably the people who asked those questions gained no reputation points, since their questions had already been asked.

I've been hitting various stack exchange sites for about 6 months or so getting all sorts of handy answers to questions that other people had asked before me, and it's been super helpful, but because so many questions have already been asked on most sites it has also meant that I haven't had much reason to stick around and participate. A lot of times I've found the answer to the question I want, done what I needed to do, and then closed the browser window. In many respects, that has been fantastic!

However, I can also imagine that from the point of view of someone wanting to participate in the community, this is something which could make getting enough reputation points to participate in various respects seem quite difficult. For example, because in many cases I just find the answer I need and then close the browser window, I quite often cannot vote up a really good answer that has helped me. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing (maybe we want high barriers to participation to prevent people who don't want to put in the effort from joining), but I am curious to hear from people who have been here for a long time about whether they've noticed that this is a sort of a stack exchange trend/issue? Does it become a little cliquey over time?

Perhaps this is less of an issue for tech-oriented stack exchange sites, where new questions are always coming up because of the rate at which tech changes, but philosophy isn't such a fast moving thing...

Answer 1

Generally speaking , it could be true, but not for the reasons you cite. If you look at the reputation tables for each year, the number of reputation points gained by the top ten users for that year has steadily increased over time from about 17,000 points in 2012 to 50,000 in 2016. Similarly, the number of users increasing their reputation by 1000 points or more in the year has steadily gone up from 12 to 21 in the same time period.

This means that questions on which one can gain a relatively good reputation increase are probably still turning up (there are, of course other ways to gain reputation, like editing a lot, but they are much less significant).

As to your subsequent question about whether it can become a little "cliquey" over time, then certainly the reputation leagues show; of the top ten users by reputation in 2016, 9 are also in the top ten users by reputation in 2015, 5 are still in the top ten in 2014, so yes, the top users do not have a high turnover, year on year (presuming that at least certain quantity of the change is simply going to come from users just outside the top ten one year and just inside it another rather than wholly from new users rising up the ranks).

So what's happening is sufficient new questions are being asked to gain reputation, but the group of high reputation users to which that reputation is being awarded does not change much year on year.

Given that moderation benefits are awarded to high reputation users these users will mould the site to what they think is in its best interests, the shape of the site now will be influenced to a greater degree by the intentions of past users than those of current ones, simply because influence is disproportionately held by users who have been here longer (which is an entirely reasonable way to run a community). What this means is that when a subjective judgement has to be made about the direction of the site, that judgement will be broadly made by a small group of people, none of whom will be new members. Of course that does make things seem a little "cliquey" if you get involved in any of these subjective judgements (like having questions or answers removed/edited/put on hold etc), but there is not really any workable alternative, we simply rely on the good intentions of high reputation users to bear in mind the wishes of the current community when making subjective decisions.