[ajfjrbfbf]

> Over the last ~9 years I've spent way too much time answering questions on stack overflow. I don't know why. I want to say it's because I like helping people. It's certainly not for "internet points"

I've asked myself the same question and couldn't find a satisfying answer. The best explanation I found was that StackOverflow had become for me a way to procrastinate, and then tell myself I've done something useful. I realized I don't care much about helping people, In fact the awful quality of the majority of the questions is depressing more than anything else. Perhaps I should consider stopping too.

[mdaniel]

Aside from my own opinions about helping, I find it slots into the same brain receptor as playing Zachtronics games: it's solving puzzles, which feels like "work," but that one can do in 15 minute(?) chunks without having to deal with a lot of the extraneous stuff

Unlike the games, however, hopefully both me and the asker learn something every now and then, since for any modern technology there are countless weird interactions or unexplored documentation pages

I am cognizant of the "free labor" bug mentioned in the other comments, but since I am somewhere between mildly addicted and actually enjoying the problem solving, I don't feel exploited, or at least can quit when I think it becomes a problem

Separately, I also participate in moderation activities, and I have violentmonkey scripts to ease the repetitive "you no read, huh?" silliness inevitably brought by new users, but that's the part I hate the most. I would pay real money if SO adopted the downvote (or even close) reason taxonomy from https://idownvotedbecau.se and if SO was open source I'd open a PR to add it