[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...