[TylerH]

The vast majority of users never post an answer or a question, and most of those that post only once or twice never get upvoted (or get downvoted more than upvoted), so their reputation stays at 1.

I think they said a couple years ago that over 50 or 60% of registered users have 1 reputation.

[usrusr]

After all those years of being merely a reader I felt like transitioning from reader to contributor recently and the amount of roadblocks you get at reputation one is simply too much. There's an answer you think could become more useful with your comment warning of a pitfall to be aware of? Sorry kid, no can do, you need to grind away with top level answers before you can spread you finite wisdom in the small print. This level of gamification puts the subset of contributing users through a heavy self-selection filter and I would expect that the subset that makes through would turn out far worse (spammy, eager to game the system) than what we see. Have the thresholds always been this high or did the walls grow higher over time?

[bhandziuk]

Just positively edit a few questions. You'll get rep for that.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

Questions by new users usually need a lot of editing so there is no shortage of things which need editing. You'll get 15 rep after 7 approved edits. Things will accelerate from there.

[nickysielicki]

For what? I've already built up the internal momentum to go out of my way to fix someone being wrong about something trivial on the internet, and now you're telling me I need to invest my time on even more trivial pedantic bullshit (like editing wording on an accepted answer) just to gain the privilege to make a top level answer?

You'd think that with such strict rules, StackOverflow would have very high quality questions and very high quality answers. But it actually doesn't. One aspect of being a good developer is catching a stackoverflow answer in a mistake and being capable of rejudging the rest of the answer section as a result (ie: scrolling further down and finding the correct answer that has zero upvotes).

[bhandziuk]

You'll notice that anyone can write an answer (or ask a a question) with zero interference. There is no rep barrier to contributing an answer.

If you want to participate in other ways without answering or asking questions then there are still ways to do that.

[nickysielicki]

Was it always this way? It's been a few years since I last gave it a shot.

[bhandziuk]

Yes, since the very start. I'm 95% sure. That's been the big selling point from what I can remember: there is a very low barrier to entry (make an account)