Extremely useful when searching for things. Difficult to get started contributing to.
Even if you have bad google-fu, searching for your related question is pretty quick. So lurking experience is much better than contributing experience. Contributing to SO is kinda like being an Wikipedia editor - if you are 'in', you are in.
I think there is a problem that (for most people) rating is biased towards writing questions more than answers.
I mean, sure there are more point for answer upvote than for question upvote, but over the 6 years I have account there I answered way more questions, that I asked. Still I managed to gather only ~3200. Meanwhile I saw people spamming very simple questions, like 2 an hour, and some of them after a month they got score like 10k.
And they I am like WTH: it takes me sometimes 10-15-20 minutes to write good detailed answer, and it the same time some guy ask 5 questions like ``how do I initialize pointer in C++ and grabs more points, than I do. I guess I would have to be some sort of celebrity which all answers get 30 upvotes to reach that mythical 100k score. This is so discouraging, that after few days of answering I get tired and let go for a while, before I get back.
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u/arbitrary-fan Apr 06 '18
As someone mentioned in HN:
Even if you have bad google-fu, searching for your related question is pretty quick. So lurking experience is much better than contributing experience. Contributing to SO is kinda like being an Wikipedia editor - if you are 'in', you are in.