I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining

There are some valid points though for both contributing and not contributing to SO. The fact that you need to be 'really fast' to answer questions does indeed hold mostly for the simple answers. And actually there I found that it's best to write a short, concise answer to the question and post that - more chance of being first - and then alter your question to add additional information that was not crucial, but still nice to have.

Anyway, SO is still a good resource for problems that are not that esoteric. With esoteric questions, the odds of someone finding your question and being able to answer it in reasonable time is smaller, and you're probably better of either looking through the docs yourself or, if possible, looking at the open-source code.

That it's hostile to newbies could be true. But it can also be hostile to people who have been using the site for quite some time. That is, unfortunately, part of the internet these days. Trolls are hard to avoid on websites with a big community.

For instance I found a browser bug in the code submitted on a stack overflow answer [1] and I edited it and it got rejected because it wasn't in the spirit of what the original author intended or something like that.

I also had no way of replying to the rejection motivating what my reasoning was and maybe reinstating it luckily the original author got in touch and fixed it himself later on.

At that point I wasn't even able to comment on the reply since I didn't have enough points so I would ague the barrier to entry is quite high if all you want to do is just fix a few mistakes you spot while using the site.

Also there are multiple communities like Ask Ubuntu, Server Fault each with their own points which means I run into the same problem over and over again even though I have proven myself on anther sister community.

[1](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12131273/twitter-bootstra...)

1) When you've got a problem, Google it. 98% of the time the answer will be in top 5 links to stackoverflow or documentation. You upvote the answer and question.

2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn't have an answer, or the answer has issues.

You figure it out yourself, so you post a comment or answer or just the crappy workaround you used because you ran out of time to figure it out completely.

3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing. You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it's an esoteric, hard question. 24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround.

And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question. (Once this happened to me >3 years after I posted it!) It's way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem.

You don't get a lot of karma quickly this way since you're posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like "Populist" and "Necromancer". You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though. What's satisfying is seeing an answer tick over from zero to one ~12 months after you posted it, realising that you saved somebody hours of frustration.

If you answer an easy question, you've saved somebody a few minutes. When you answer a hard one, you've saved hours or days.

They were not good days.