Off topic funny story: My highest voted answer on SO is a very basic one about Pandas, from 7 years ago. It's funny that I've only used Pands for a few weeks, years ago (I would need to relearn it from scratch now), but 90% of my SO score comes from that answer and I still get more points almost daily. In fact I'm in the top 6% of SO mostly thanks to that answer.
I'm in the same boat, 95% of my SO points come from an answer that was basically a copy pasted script to fix an obscure VMWare error with Ubuntu. Turns out a lot of people had the same issue that day.
Since all votes have the same weight I guess it makes sense that the answers to most basic questions or highly common problems will get the most points. Maybe SO should have a button to donate points to an answer that really saved your bacon, a super-upvote if you will. (I know you can attach bounties to questions, but that's not really feasibly when you come across something that has already been answered).
But yeah, crowd behavior is fun. I have the feeling I can time when some computer vision courses (or the semester) starts, as suddenly there's many upvotes on my basic answer explaining BGR/RGB color space confusion with OpenCV, the computer vision library :)
Funny that this is brought up. As an undergraduate in a Data Scientist class we did analysis on the SO dataset (we processed the whole thing using RStudio running on a big EC2 instance). I found that about ~1,000 users that have made less than fifty posts have moderator privileges. In that report, I suggested that they should give users quality points (Upvotes / # Page Views) rather than straight reputation points.
Yes it is, IIRC I've given bounties to answers from long ago just to donate points to an answer that was really good. In fact it's in part exactly for this reason, since you can pick as one of the official reasons:
Ok it's feasible, let me reword: it's awkward. You have to hunt for the "start a bounty" link in the question, not the answer, and then presumably still have the minimum bounty period of 24 hours, after which you have to come back to award it to the answer you wanted to reward?
