[bluedino]

>> I never contributed which is really a miss on my part

I love StackOverflow. However, I think the worst part of Stack Overflow is how hard it is to contribute as a new member. You need to build up reputation points and they can be very hard to get. Questions get 'sniped', answers get deleted or buried, and very often when you help another new user out, they never return to the site to accept your answer. It's very frustrating to take the time to answer a question and not receive any feedback.

[eterm]

The best way "in" as a newcomer is to have some knowledge that no one else has. In my case my first good answer (although it took months to get any rep at all) was an obscure bit of paypal sandbox knowledge. I actually came across the knowledge first, and since the problem I had hadn't been solved via StackOverflow I searched SO for the same problem I had been having and updated the old question with my new found solution.

That has since earned me 50 rep. This along with a few other bits took me to the 200 threshold which then gives 100 rep across all stackexchange sites. (Enough to upvote/comment.)

But the fact that "newbies" can't contribute what in all honestly is largely going to be misinformation or "me too" answers is also part of the genius, it gives real answers breathing room and keeps spam out.

My question asking has been less successful. I've asked 2 questions, one of which had no response whatsoever, and the other had an answer which answered the question in the community's mind but because I had been slack with my terminology didn't answer the issue I was really having.

[_JamesA_]

Rep on SO is unpredictable.

For example I randomly answered a question outside of my primary domain because it was a relatively easy issue that I had encountered myself. I have since earned close to 2,000 rep from that simple answer alone and get 20-50 points a week from it despite it being over 2 years old.

On the other hand answers that I spent way too much time researching have hardly attracted any points at all.

[obituary_latte]

Same experience here. Quick, one or two line answers to simple, common questions seem to do the best.

Although, those questions that I've poured the most time into and really tried to answer thoroughly are my favorites. Especially if it's something I had to do a bunch of research and/or testing to confirm. The lack of feedback is supplanted by the quenching of the thirst to learn something new. In fact, this quenching is my favorite part of the SE sites.

[fusiongyro]

Definitely. Most of my rep is from Prolog answers. I can spend an hour on a lengthy, detailed answer, and the best I can hope for is <4 votes and (maybe) an acceptance. Average return on an answer is probably 20 rep. OTOH, if I squeak a Haskell answer in, average is more like 50-100 rep because there's simply a lot more eyes on Haskell answers. At the same time, this means while there's a good hour or two window between a Prolog question being asked, it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question. The community is just really good like that. So there's a limiting factor problem there. Competition for MySQL and Postgres answers is also really high so you have to be really fast with your answering, but all my "greatest hits" were in Postgres.

Question-askers benefit the most from this competitiveness, but without a niche it would be really hard to break in. For a little while it seemed like people were starting to treat S.O. activity as a test of your virtue or capabilities as a programmer. Today it seems absurd to judge someone for not having an account. It's just too hard to get started.

[zerr]

Interesting, you talk about the competition, breaking in, monitoring unanswered questions so you can answer first, etc... - What's the motivation behind it?

I guess it is not just contributing to the common knowledge, but maybe to show off your profile to potential employers or similar?

[fusiongyro]

For me, I just like being helpful. The rep is nice too. Stupid internet points are pretty motivational, but I also review edits, and you don't get any rep for that. I would be flattered if an employer had noticed me on there, but I don't think it's likely to happen. I've been active on SO for longer than I've been active here, but I have gotten many friendly recruitment emails from here and none from there.

Prolog is an extremely small niche. Most of the questions are pretty basic and from students. I don't like seeing students being told odd things about Prolog, with a dismissive air of "Prolog makes no sense, you just have to feed it this nonsense to make it go." So another part of my motivation is to keep this sad religion alive and inviting. Haskell has a much larger community of people working very hard to make it inviting.

The hiring angle probably works better for other niches. Every Java EE question is answered by BalusC. I imagine that pays dividends for his consulting: he's the most helpful guy in that area and I'd hire him in a second if I were in charge of that kind of thing.

[tiedemann]

My last two job offers came from people who had checked out my SO answers among other things.

[fusiongyro]

Wow, I feel so disproven.

[praptak]

> it's more like 2 minutes for a Haskell question

My experience: it is still possible to come in an hour and beat the quick answers, although I agree with the other comments about the rep being somewhat unpredictable.

[andrewcooke]

it's got harder for everyone. i'm over 10k and mine isn't going up quickly any more. there are fewer interesting questions (partly because many have been asked, but also because the sites have fragmented and the policing is more strict) and more competition answering.

i'm less sure, but i think answers are getting worse too. it feels like the smarter people have disappeared.

[mcv]

I don't get much rep for answers. I get it for asking the right questions. My rep still isn't fantastic (a few hundred), but it's good enough to give a bounty when I need it.

[tracker1]

If you are looking for something, and find older questions, try creating an updated answer for something, or even re-visiting your old answers. A lot of time an answer can change over time, new frameworks/tools etc... about half of my points come from the graveyard.

[nine_k]

Try giving more general, more in-depth answers. Such answers, if correct, get dug up by search and keep bringing upvotes months, or even years, after having been written.

[mcv]

I don't get much rep for answers because usually someone else has already given a better answer than I'm able to give. I'm just saying you don't actually have to know anything to get rep. You can get it for asking good questions too. (But first search to check if someone else has already asked the same thing.)

[joe_the_user]

I worked my reputation up to nearly 2000 at the start and then gradually fell off with considerable disgust.

Part of it is that it seems that within a year, the good questions were pretty much answered. It's notable that in the first year, especially the first six months, the site was carefully curated and had a friendly feel to it.

In the present SO, answering questions has become a matter of getting your low-quality answer to a low-quality question out extremely quickly or having some pretty obscure technical knowledge (even then, you're going to get karma only for obscure knowledge, not for a quality answer). And, yeah, I suppose you game things by creating a question similar to an existing high karma question (and this stuff also lowers average site quality too since the best answers kind of hide within ten similar questions).

Further, SO ironically turns out to be much useful when you Google than when you ask your own questions - questions beyond a given difficulty go wanting even if you give a high Karma reward. It seems the smart answers just skim for simplistic questions rather than spending time on any hard questions.

It seems like SO is now just kind of a low-quality-question fest because they've got a troove of good answers from their first year of existence.

I mean, one can claim hn has declined but any decline in hn is a thousand times less than the way StackOverflow has tanked as a site (but it's still great for googling all the good answers from yesteryear. When you're doing that, take note of the answer's dates, btw, I believe that it revealing).

[chx]

I disagree. I have 5K rep, I am not quite a newbie myself so I rarely ask. But just this month I have been under a lot of pressure with a site launch so I did put in a few questions. When I've asked a tricky MySQL question someone came in like ten minutes, produced a working answer, soon edited to add a fiddle. The dude is programming almost longer than I am alive! I asked a regexp question -- someone with over 50k answered that. Where else would you find free advice like that? SO is amazing.

[Kluny]

I made this site: www.rocketships.ca/fixmybug due to that very frustration. It doesn't in anyway replace SO, it's intended to help us help each other solve minor syntax errors and misunderstandings... the sort of thing that gets you banned from Stack Overflow. It's pretty quiet now though as I never got around to drumming up users.

[jgoldsmith]

Just a heads up for anyone tempted to run the code from the third question (bash script to play triforce through the system speaker), don't.

I know I'm an idiot for running random code, but I'll save you the suspense - it prints "rm -fr" but doesn't run it, and then prints a message berating you for running it, and insults the Q&A site.

[Kluny]

Baha, that's hilarious.

[smsm42]

Well, that's because a lot of people use SO as either "do my homework for me" or "I'm too lazy to RTFM, please read it for me" kind of site. But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions. But I admit it has become harder to contribute - even in areas that I have considerable knowledge, most questions aren't either interesting or worth the time, and those that are I'd be missing since I can't keep up with the inflow of low-value questions. I wonder if SO has any ideas how to fix it...

[joe_the_user]

But under the pile of this manure, real content is still there, real people with knowledge still answer real questions.

No, not really, not in a density that makes it worth it from anyone. I mean I looked hard at several points for question answerers as well as attempting to be one. You yourself admit the place broken by the end of your post.

The obvious thing is that good answers that involve effort on the part of the answerer generally don't get you anything like the appropriate Karma.

Even more, SO actually reduced the amount of Karma you could get by asking questions so there's nothing to distinguish good questions from crap questions.

[smsm42]

I don't see it as black and white. I still use it and even answer things from time to time. But I recognize there's a problem.

[JeremyBanks]

The purpose of Stack Overflow is not to serve the people who ask the questions, that's just a happy side-effect. The purpose is to create a resource to serve future Googlers.

There are less broadly-interesting new questions in areas of established technology, but that's fine: there's less need for new questions in areas that the site already serves well. Stack Overflow is not having any trouble getting good questions about new technology as it becomes out.

[ryanSrich]

A quick and dirty way to get karma is by taking an already existing answer to a similar question and just tweak for the new question.

[lrobb]

StackOverflow solved a lot of usenet's problems, while creating an entirely new set of problems.

[ufmace]

That's the kind of annoying part about trying to answer questions. Anything requiring a relatively modest amount of knowledge gets answered in seconds. Try to type up something good and comprehensive with links to documentation and all, and there will probably be 4 other answers by the time you're done. And a lot of the moderately challenging or obscure things have been asked and answered already.

Meanwhile, if you actually manage to answer or document some tricky, obscure thing, then often it never gets enough traffic to earn much reputation. Mine is still pretty low, but my highest-rep answer is a one-liner, telling somebody that Mercurial can't track files outside of the repository root directory structure. Meanwhile, an actual challenging, obscure answer, like the one on running ASP.NET with C++ dlls (hint: avoid if at all possible) gets very little.

Asking good questions helps too, but I usually find it faster to look it up or figure it out myself than to format a decent question and wait for responses.

[woah]

Well this is a feature if you are looking at SO as a place to get answers. There are far more people looking for answers (by asking OR searching) to the basic simple questions.

So if you leave a good answer on something basic and simple, you have provided utility to far more people than if you are leaving a detailed answer to an obscure question.

This, incidentally, is what's lacking in the IRC channels of open source projects. In an IRC channel, questions that are not hard enough get ignored because they are not interesting to the experts in the channel.

So the IRC channel is good if you are hacking on the core, while SO is good if you are just trying to get something done, and the technology in question is a small part of your entire stack.

[Shog9]

Patience in online discussions is probably the most valuable (and definitely the most unexpected) thing I've gained from spending time on SO.

Coming from a more traditional forum, I originally expected questions that had a highly-upvoted or "marked" answer to essentially be over and done with - the majority of people will already have read the thread, so relatively few new votes will come in...

...But after five years, I've had ample opportunity to realize this is a flawed way to look at threads - questions - when the vast majority of readers come in via Google in the months and years following its asking.

Being quick on the draw can be fun, but being useful is what nets you the most attention long-term. Folks with real problems tend to keep reading until an answer actually solves them. And the race is not always to the swift...

[siegecraft]

This is why, despite using the site since the beginning, I don't have an account. The effort required to get enough rep to do anything useful on the site is simply not worth it, and it remains just as useful to me as an anonymous lurker. The few times I have actually tried to build rep have been an exercise in frustration.

[nine_k]

If you have no time or incentive to share your knowledge (which is totally OK), maybe staying anonymous is just the right strategy.

Still, to ask a question you have to have only 1 rep point. A really good question or two can get you 100-200 rep in just a few hours. Try it if when you have a good question at hand.

[cranefly]

If it's a c# question maybe. Not many votes in vb.

[nine_k]

One of very simple answers, one that I gave 2.5 years ago, just can't stop bringing an occasional upvote: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5762327/

This is definitely not rocket science, it's just 5-6 minutes honestly spent to research and write down the answer.

Usually longer and more thoughtful answers get a constant barrage of upvotes, though.

[hrasyid]

why would you "try to build rep"?

[siegecraft]

Just to be able to do the normal things you would expect to be able to do: vote down/up, flag things, edit a wiki. That's right, I couldn't even make it to 10 rep...

[pramodliv1]

StackOverflow is intensely competitive when it comes to answering new questions on your favorite tags.

So you could just post answers to problems you debugged on your own and then search SO for a similar question and add your answer. Over a period of time, you'd be surprised when your answers gain votes organically.

[joshdance]

Getting started as a new member is hard. Getting started as a new programmer is even harder. You have to ask questions carefully, and search for a previous answer like mad. It has taken my a year and I still feel like I am just barely a member.

[sampo]

I have mostly build my reputation (but it's only in three digits) by asking questions that were meaningful to my problems at hand. And sometimes answering my own questions later.

[dysoco]

I agree, the community is somewhat elitist, I got banned from asking about two years ago (Because of low reputation, I was much more "noob") and I'm still waiting...

[Shog9]

Contact the team: http://stackoverflow.com/contact

We'll get you sorted out.