 Stack Overflow should pay its top contributors

One may dream.

If they belive that their reputation is a representative meaningful metric, then it should be fine!

And if not, then they should fix it.

Notably, more people would try to "game" the system by quickly answering lots of small impact answers which could tilt things off a bit. Not to mention straight out fraud.

So basically less money into developers doing useless new features for the website, and more money back into meaningful contributors.

How about 2k USD / month for the number one contributor of the year, going linearly down to 0 for the 200th? This would be 100k USD / month, so about 12 developers.