The problem with the SO reputation system is that one-sentence answers to some very basic problem end up earning you > 100 reputation, but a long, well-written answer to a niche question gets you maybe 10 or 20.
I'm not really sure what the solution to this is (it's not dissimilar to the situation here since the comment scores got hidden).
I don't think there is a solution - popular stuff will be popular. Is a solution needed, though? The point is to get answers - votes from answers are the incentive, but in the end, it's just a bunch of numbers.
As long as the results are obvious - e.g. a question with answers having 75%, 15%, 10% and 5% of votes - it's not terribly interesting whether that means 15, 3, 2 and 1 vote, or 750, 150, 100 and 50. Also, being able to vote posts <0 is good - bogus answers will be apparent.
I think that one gets so many upvotes because people who know how hard it is to send a lot of e-mail love to point that answer to people who don't (e.g. bosses, clients) making it very useful to a lot of people.
Exactly! My point wasn't to get a ridiculous number of votes on it. My point in writing this was to be useful - even for me - as a "go-to" answer for the question that gets asked all the time (I did start out short-ish, and expanded it over time).
It's an outlier for sure; I think 99.9% of all posts never get beyond 50 votes, and most don't get over 10 - mind you, most of my posts have fewer than 2 votes. With popular topics, you get more votes simply because there are more people looking at your question; does that make this one so great because it has 700+ votes? I'd say it says that sending e-mails is a popular topic, first and foremost - and apparently the question is also somewhat useful. And then the snowball effect kicks in, and the post gets more popular because it's so popular.
Anyway, a +5 in a niche (such as this answer which someone gave to me on a rather narrow problem: http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 ), to me, carries more weight than +500 in a topic with which everyone is somewhat familiar.
Well-written answers to niche questions are inherently worth more than simple answers to simple questions, because there is a much greater supply of the latter than the former.
Indeed the marginal value of the umpeenth identical answer to the same question is approximately zero, since it adds nothing to any of the earlier answers to the same question.
I'm not really sure what the solution to this is (it's not dissimilar to the situation here since the comment scores got hidden).