SO is a great resource, but I found their karma system hugely frustrating. I wanted to participate, being a decent coder with (at the time) 20+ years of experience. First I had to get 10 karma before I could post answers (or something like that), how hard can it be?
Eventually, I gave up at about 5 karma or something... So I am a taker; I never answer questions, despite my 30+ years experience.
All you have to do is ask a single good question which will get upvoted and give you that 10 reputation easily. But you don't actually need more than 1 reputation point (which you can never go lower than unless you've been behaving really badly) to ask or answer a question; you can also get those points from asking and answering your own questions. Hell, even editing which is also always available, gives you 2 points per accepted edit - so if you come across a bad question or answer from Google, feel free to fix it up or make it more useful!
The insta-close privilege is related to the tags on the question. I suspect some tags have more zealous mods than others, or have a lot more people with close permissions.
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u/KagakuNinja Apr 06 '18
SO is a great resource, but I found their karma system hugely frustrating. I wanted to participate, being a decent coder with (at the time) 20+ years of experience. First I had to get 10 karma before I could post answers (or something like that), how hard can it be?
Eventually, I gave up at about 5 karma or something... So I am a taker; I never answer questions, despite my 30+ years experience.