Often the amount of work for an answer to a question and the reputation gain for this answer are inversely proportional.
For example, today I answered six questions on Stackoverflow, and two of them where quite simple answers, typed in a minute or less. These got (in less then one hour each) 9 votes or 6 votes and an accept, i.e. 90 or 75 reputation points. I doubt that these were from people who had the same problem.
For the other answers, I invested more time, but only got one upvote (or none). Okay, in one case there was another better answer written while I wrote mine, but for example this one is the only answer.
I feel a bit that this is not really fair.
So, what is the recipe for getting many upvotes?
- Having a live feed on new questions and reply to simple ones before anyone else has the chance to do so?
- other ideas?
Note that I'm normally not chasing simple questions, I just got "lucky" today with two of those.