[birn559]

Is it really dying? There's only so much growth possible without having it flooded with low effort stuff. They try to instead grow by introducing more topics, but that's limited as well.

I personally didn't use it so much (meaning: Writing content) because it always felt a bit over engineered. From what I remember the only possible entry point is writing questions that get up voted. Not allowed to even write comments, vote and of course not allowed to answer questions. Maybe that's not correct but that has always been my impression.

In general stack exchange seems to be a great platform. I think "it's dying" has an unfortunate connotation. It's not like content just vanishes, just the amount of new stuff is shrinking.

[danbruc]

Maybe it changed, but you could ask and answer questions right after signing up, just commenting, voting, and moderation rights required a certain amount of points. I only answered questions and was among the top 100 contributors at my peak activity but that was at least a decade ago.

I stopped contributing when the question quality fell of a cliff. Existing contributors got annoyed by the low effort questions, new users got annoyed because their questions got immediately closed, it was no longer fun. There were a lot of discussions on meta how to handle the situation but I just left.

So admittedly things might have changed again, I do not really know much about the development in the last ten or so years.

[Izkata]

That's still how it works: https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges

If you're logged out it's just a list, but if you're logged in it'll grey out and put a checkmark next to the ones you have.