Asking questions is a skill: Lessons from 10 years of Stack Overflow
>> This feels deeply unfair in some sense... Having said that, I’m not sure what Stack Overflow should do about this.<p>SO would benefit greatly by implementing a (relatively slow) decay function on all its reputation points. Technology inevitably moves forward, a great answer (or question) from 6,8,10 years ago is the most likely age to have a huge quantity of upvotes, while also most likely to be obsolete.<p>While rep alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for answering questions, when people see their point totals heading south after a few years, it might provide an incentive to get back on and reverse the negative flow by answering new questions and/or updating prior answers.