I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem.
Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However, the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community, which is what makes Stack Overflow good.
You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.
Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle so that you can participate.
This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know about it.
The 'initial rep hurdle' is so low that any dimwit -- pardon my French -- can overcome it... As some others have pointed out, too easily actually, judging from the number of bad answers from people with a few K of rep.
I don't care to participate in SO often. I don't have high rep.
I _can_ provide insight.
every once in a while I find somewhere that I can provide some value or insight, whether via editing an answer with a url that's out of date, a comment expanding on the answer, etc... and it seems like I never can.
I don't care to jump through the hurdles to get to that point. I didn't come there to ask a question. I didn't come there to sift through questions to answer.
I came looking for something. I stumbled upon something where I could provide value and was shut down because I have better things to do with my time than to jump through hoops.
It's fine for the power users who want the world to see their rep, or the people trolling for questions regarding their pet projects. It sucks for the casual user.
So, yes, in theory the rep hurdle is quite low. I've just got better things to do with my time. -- Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the first place.
This has been my experience as well. Actually, it's worse. I actually managed to earn a bunch of points on SO by finding some questions that needed better questions...but it took a long time to get there for all the usual reasons of not wanting to jump through those hoops or spend lots of time trolling the site. Then I did something really stupid: I had an outstanding unanswered question about a really obscure subject, and I thought well, is someone answers this they deserve a bounty, so I added one. I didn't really care about rep, and my question was hard, so I put most of my points into it. It didn't occur to me that spending most of my rep would cause my account to degrade back into noob mode; I was thinking I had earned the privelegs of a normal user and they were mine to keep.
Worst of all, my question went unanswered, and the bounty was just claimed by the system.
I haven't earned back enough reputation to be a normal user again, although I have stumbled across many SO questions/answers that could use my insight. Since I can't use the site correctly, I just leave.
You do realize that they can't just grant anyone the right to edit questions or answers and that they don't have magical insight into your abilities? I don't know how you propose to solve the problem of automatically allowing those that have ability to bear responsibility, but I don't think there is any site that does it better than SO.
It sucks for the casual user.
I'm a casual user (I have 1.5K rep and subscribed reasonably early, so we're talking about 10 decent answers per year) and I don't think so.
Which I already wasted trying to help someone in the
first place.
Then SO is not for you, because SO only makes sense if its users want to help others, for whatever reason. I personally like trying to explain something clearly and concisely and I like solving the problems that are sometimes posed. I answer questions for my own good, but it is gratifying that someone else also profits.
A casual user should at the very least be able to flag an answer for review by a more senior user (and earn rep).
For example, fixing broken links, or Facebook API changes that make old answers invalid.
Over a sustained 2.5 year period, not really. I mean what percentile of activity/reputation do you think you'd be in for all members in that period? I'd guess well over 50... perhaps 75 or 80?
Programming is my full time job and I ask questions on SO somewhat regularly when I get stumped, and occasionally peruse for questions I can answer, but I don't make any efforts in particular to raise my rep for its own sake, and I just reached 100 rep after being a member for a year. I feel like I fit into the 'casual user' camp that he's referring to in the OP since I'm still pretty limited in my participation even though I FEEL like a somewhat invested member of the community. But I don't think these issues would really apply to you at your level of activity (and kudos to you for that, btw :) ).
The problem is that I want to help, but I can't. If they've added what other users have suggested, that anons or newbs can provide answers/edits that have to be approved by a more senior user that probably covers about 99% of the situations that I'm concerned with.
You're right that the system can't know my insight. But the community can. It is a community right?
I'm cool with going through some sort of approval process. If it means that it takes a few extra minutes for my changes to get in then so be it.
I think this is key. I answer questions to help other people. I also answer them to help improve my own ability to explain solutions to programming problems. Usually the problems are ones that I myself have dealt with before. I tend to answer questions pretty late, in a few relatively low-view tags, and I can tell from the view counts that maybe 10-50 people at most ever read any of my answers. But usually the asker of the question sees it and finds it useful enough to accept it.
This week, the ability for anonymous, 0 rep users to edit questions was added. They go into a queue where other users must approve or reject the proposed edit, but you can drive-by suggest those improvements now.
Agreed I have not really been participating for long but have managed to get myself upto a point where I can participate easily. It just requires some effort and some knowledge
Valid, but asking questions is hard to do consistently. I've only ever asked questions if I've been unable to deal with a problem. Answering questions is something I can do on my own time because it's fun. Answering questions is what draws me to the Stack Overflow community.
The way I view it it's just a particularity of the way Stack Overflow has been set up. I think cletus is correct - rep cannot be your goal or you're bound to get frustrated as the OP found out.
Why not ask questions that you've solved yourself with much effort and googling? That would mean that that knowledge is captured on SO for easier access by others.
Peter Programmer knows Python very well and is a highly skilled programmer, but there is a rep hurdle Peter can't pass because there are already tons of eager Python programmers answering every question at least as good as Peter. This means SO doesn't need Peter or his contributions. At all.
If your contributions are unique and useful, you pass the rep hurdle easily.
Unique and useful to lots of people, you pass the rep hurdle easily. If it's only useful to a few people passing the rep hurdle will take a very long time.
As you have mentioned Python, let met tell you that the Python community on SO is awesome. People generally upvote all the good/correct answers to a question. This will not only appreciate their good work, but also make them answer more questions. In recent days, the percentage of questions on HTML/CSS, jQuery has increased greatly. The questions related to general purpose programming languages tend to be more unique than HTML/CSS.
I have the same feeling about HN. I've been regularly visiting HN for a year now, commenting when I have something insightful and voting articles and comments up if they're exceptional. Yet I still don't have enough karma to downvote. The feeling I get is- I'm a long-time member of the community, what do I need to do to be trusted with a simple downvote?
This isn't that bad since I can still be part of any discussion, but it makes feel unwelcome and a little frustrated when I see something that should be downvoted.
StackOverflow and Hacker News both seem to actively discourage casual participation. I am the sort of person who doesn't like to speak unless I have something new to add, so I don't post comments or answer questions often.
However, I'm quite happy to use my time and energy to tend the garden and pull weeds, and plant something new when I happen to have a really great seed. HN and SO both tell me they don't want me there -- fine, their sites, their rules. But I do feel this encourages a high noise to signal ratio, eventually clogging the site and making it less useful.
What I find even more frustrating is getting enough karma to do things like downvoting, and then losing those abilities out of the blue because the requirements were moved up.
Perhaps my own experience is atypical but I'll elaborate anyway.
SO had been out of beta for a 4-5 months before I really started answering questions. I had dipped my toe in the water a couple of times prior with varying results: one particularly successful answer, several unsuccessful answers.
Granted, now is not a few months after launch. Questions tend to be more esoteric, there are more question snipers/campers and so on. But IMHO the same principles still apply: be quick and be concise. You can expand a concise answer with a longer answer but you can't usually ignore the concise answer.
Now some consider that a bad thing. Me? I think it trains people how to give good answers and not just for SO but in their work life in general: front load the information people ask for and then expand on it.
As for getting the initial rep: getting rep to vote to close and so on takes awhile but do you need that? The more annoying levels are when you can't comment or upvote. That you can get fairly quickly just by asking 1-2 questions if not answering them.
My own experience is that newbies who ask good questions or give good answers I (and others) will upvote them simply to get them past these points (to about 50 rep).
As for the barrier to entry and community aspects, there are issues here. In fact, I raised this very issue 1.5 years ago [1] and I still have mixed feelings about it.
Ultimately though, an abundance of answerers I don't consider to be a problem. With attrition, others will replace them. I'd only worry if no one is answering.
I don't see the value of SO is being in the community per se. Not in the same sense that the value in Quora (IMHO) is entirely in the community (which presents real long-term risks).
What SO did well, which obviously affected the community that grew around it (and Joel has spoken about this), is that it made bad behaviour hard, something people would actually complain about. Example: a common complaint is that SO makes discussion hard. Well, that's actually kinda the point. Discussions are 99% noise in the context of Q&A. SO allows good answers to float to the top with the voting mechanism.
Remember: rep isn't an end, it's a means to an end. It's also a way of solving problems that would otherwise require human intervention. For example, the minimum rep for editing answers. This isn't a de facto claim that a certain rep threshold means you know what you're talking about. It's simply a way of expressing the site's trust in you, as a contributor, rather than attesting to the accuracy of your technical knowledge.
Better that than Wikipedia-style revert wars that require constant mod attention.
SO is an excellent system for askers and answerers of programming questions. I'm simply unconvinced that this models translates well to other areas (as per the StackExchange model for other sites).
Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However, the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community, which is what makes Stack Overflow good.
You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.