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I'm still fairly new to Ask Ubuntu, and trying to build my rep steadily. I have a bit of solid knowledge in some areas, and try to apply that to answering questions (only if I know what I'm talking about).

The issue I'm seeing, is that with these fairly easy answers, whilst I'm composing a reply, some more experienced user, usually with rep > 40k, swoops in and answers the easy question, snaffling the rep in the process.

I'm not moaning about someone being quicker than me, it just seems that difficult questions, that these users have more of a chance of answering, tend to be ignored in favour of easy rep points.

I'm not proposing that experienced users should be blocked from answering these, it's just demoralising. Any suggestions on ways around this? Or just man up and keep plugging away?

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    On Meta Stack Exchange: meta.stackexchange.com/q/3521/270345
    – muru
    Feb 24, 2015 at 13:11
  • Thanks for the link @muru , I didn't want to be a whiny little... so and so! I suppose it's not bad to request an upvote even if your answer isn't accepted, the OP can always decide not to.
    – Arronical
    Feb 24, 2015 at 13:51
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    Or others might. Maybe even the higher rep user who poached it. :)
    – muru
    Feb 24, 2015 at 13:53
  • I think that may have happened about 10 mins after I posted this question :)
    – Arronical
    Feb 24, 2015 at 14:03
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    Nothing beats the feeling of outsmarting Oli and/or fossfreedom.
    – Rinzwind
    Feb 24, 2015 at 14:41
  • I'l keep refining my skills, with the dream of someday scaling those lofty heights @Rinzwind !
    – Arronical
    Feb 24, 2015 at 14:49

2 Answers 2

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We "high rep" users very much love to see good answers coming from low rep users or users new to the site.

Consider this: all our rep comes from times we also were beginners to the site, and we tried to write answers to the best of our knowledge to help. Not all our answers are outstanding, some of our posts don't even get noticed much, but over the time there are so many of them. Even old and very old answer will give us an occasional reputation rise.

Of course we also wrote some answers that received very high votes. But these are not always those awesome, brilliant, or innovative answers, but ever so often it was sheer luck we have been there at the right time. You will experience this too, once you had contributed for some time.

Whenever I see an intersting question that was already answered it makes me happy a little, and I don't hesitate to click on "vote up", even if I then may (or most often may not) add another answer. Often when I notice that somebody else posted an answer while I was writing mine I just cancel mine (if that answer was any good). I believe all of us do the same.

You may have noticed a very special badge we can earn:

Read for yourself and find out what it is for and also see that not many users but almost all of the very high rep users earned it.

Finally, some of us give away some reputation to newbies through bounties, some even gave a way a "fortune" of reputation just to show that reputation does matter but does not matter so much at some time.

So, please don't get demoralised. Do carry on answering.

Make us upvote you!

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    Absolutely healthy view on reputation. +1
    – Jacob Vlijm
    Feb 25, 2015 at 19:16
  • Upvote? Accept? Nah. The only response I've had to an answer recently is a comment saying us guys are awesome....
    – Carl H
    Mar 5, 2015 at 9:44
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    @CarlH: that sadly is not so unusal as we might think. Note that new users can not yet upvote (and may not be aware that they still could "accept"). We may help them to do so sooner with giving them an occasional upvote to their questions ;)
    – Takkat
    Mar 5, 2015 at 10:50
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No, it would harm the site, I'd even say it would harm beginners - when you are browsing AU you will find really elaborate answers to "simple questions" with much/full explanation about the background of the issue at hand - answers from which we all can learn how to answer.

Those beneficial answers are most often written by someone with high rep - the quality of those answers show how to gain those high reputation values.

So the site and its users would loose if people with a known ability to give good answers were asked to stop giving them for "easy questions".

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    I see your point, I suppose there is a higher likelihood of getting a more complete answer from a more experienced user, and inspire other answers to be of equal quality. I guess the only solution is to try to give the best answers I can and learn from those with higher rep.
    – Arronical
    Feb 24, 2015 at 19:23

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