I loved listening to the Stack Overflow podcast with Jeff and Joel. It was kinda crazy that they were doing a podcast like that while they (Jeff mostly) were building it and coming up with the name, etc. Still have all the mp3's somewhere.

Edit: I'm in the top 2%. Most of my rep. comes from interest earned on questions/answers I posted very early on.

Ha, I'm user 26! So funny: https://stackoverflow.com/users/26/shawn

I miss that podcast. The 2 of them disagreed on some technical things, which made it more interesting. Listening to them all the way to success was pretty cool.

Is there anything else out there like it?

EDIT: People mentioning that they could remember where they were when they listened to the podcast makes me remember where I was when they had Jason Calacanis on the show who informed them that they were sitting on a gold mine.

Do top contributors get compensated financially ? This is a question that is burning me out of curiosity...

Do not get me wrong, I understand the whole point of giving back to a community, selfishly helping others and all that. But lets get a simple example: For example the famous Jon Skeet. https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet

Based on the account statistics this user is a member as of today, for 12 years and 8 months. So a total of 152 months. Again according to the site statistics, Jon Skeet provided so far 35,254 answers.

Making some assumptions of continuous linear work, :-) this user in the last almost 13 years, provided an average of 232 answers PER MONTH,non-stop for the last 13 years.

That is an average of almost 8 answers PER DAY non stop, 13 years in row, while having a job at Google ( per the site account details ...) maybe a family, side interests ? etc ...

Assuming the mythical Jon Skeet, is not a team of 200 engineers at Google :-) I want to understand how a person who provides EIGHT well researched developer related answers PER DAY, non stop, for 13 years, feels about the site founders making 2 Billion while this user ( again...presumably...) gets a pat in the back and "reputation " ?

I loved this podcast. It came about when we were a year into our first startup (freeagent.com if you wondered) and it was really influential. I loved Spolsky and he was a major influence, and we ended up colocating our infra on our own hardware for 10 years and I can attribute a lot of my faith in that strategy to some of these early discussions! Worked out very well indeed.

We’re now on AWS, go figure ;-)

I'm in the top 0.35%. For a while around 2010ish I was answering a lot of questions. I've barely even logged in in many years. I don't think the percentile is very useful. SO always tried so hard to find a way to assess devs and hopefully use that to spin up the jobs board side of the business, but I feel like despite a lot of effort it just never quite happened.

How much of the billion dollars will you get?

I was active for maybe 1 year on SO. Account is dormant ever since. Your answer prompted me to check. Still in the top 0.02%

I joined maybe within the first year or so and answered one fundamental javascript question which has earned me dividends for many years. I'm top 11% without having even looked at my profile in at least 5 years. Best part is that my answer was slightly wrong and had to be corrected by a comment.

Interesting. I've barely posted/commented — in particular I've only made seven posts since 2012 (and zero since 2018) — but I guess because signed up in 2010 I'm in the top 17% of users.

Nothing to brag about, but it's definitely higher than I would've expected. The required mental model is different from what I'm used to HN/reddit — rather than posts going stale and/or getting archived, Stack Exchange and Quora are more like social wikis. Writing a popular early answer that happens to remain relevant over time is like writing a high-profile Wikipedia article and then collecting karma on it indefinitely.

By contrast, I have the 639th Reddit account and I don’t seem to be anywhere close to the top percentile in karma.