[nostrademons]

I think I'd probably agree that the average person who participates online is more skilled than the average person who doesn't. Participating online exposes you to other perspectives and lets you test your experiences against others, after all.

And I wouldn't say that participating online is detrimental. However, I stand by my contention that participating online is not the most effective use of your time if you want to become a better programmer. Programming is. It is a more effective use of time than, say, watching TV (which a fair number of average devs would do), but the information density you learn from grappling with a real problem and trying to solve it with software far exceeds the information density available in blogs and Hacker News comments.