How does a new user get started on Stack Overflow? - Meta Stack Overflow

Question

I've been a "passive user" of Stack Overflow and other Stack Exchange sites for years. I have derived enormous benefit from it (many thanks!!), and I finally decided to become more active. It seems difficult for a "new" user to get started.

A relatively short time ago, I finally created an account to start answering and editing and posting and commenting! I was full of excitement and vigor and immediately tried to upvote (nope!) and post a comment (nope!). I need (threshold) amount of rep to do comment on this or that, or even upvote certain things... which is totally reasonable (perhaps "necessary" is a better term).

So I browsed a bit (such as whats-reputation). Advice to new users seems to be: just ask, answer, and suggest edits! But there are so many questions and good answers, a truly good question and new question seems hard to create. To truly give justice to all previous questions on a topic requires as much effort (or more?) as posing a question. And there are so many users that to troll-and-pounce the new-questions board could be a full-time job. And BTW, you can only put 2 links in a question when you have <10 rep, so it's very difficult to show due-diligence and to pose a truly good question to begin with!

I didn't find any actual "question" on this topic of how to get started -- but found a few gems like six simple rules, walking a (presumably-intentional) delicate balance between productive debate and provocative cynicism.

So I decided to post a question on this topic! Meta.SO seemed like the right place. NOPE! I needed 5 rep to even post a question. Probably also for good reason.

Now that I have >5 rep (w00t), here I am. After all that background (sorry) --
How does anyone get started around here these days?

My understanding now boils down to the following:

• You have no choice but to start slowly.
• Be patient and try to do contribute where you can.
• Be prepared to accept initial rejection and failure.
• Learn how to edit and make stuff pretty.

What am I missing? Do I "get it"? Have I completely missed the point? How can The System encourage new users who are here for the "right reasons" to quickly start contributing meaningfully and harness their energy for the Common Good?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65884268/how-to-increase-reputation-points

Answer 1

It seems like you get it. Long gone are the days of camping on the front page to gain fast reputation by quickly answering softball questions. The questions are coming in too quickly, site standards have changed drastically, and there's a lot more competition to either answer or close easy questions.

The one piece of advice that I'll give you that you haven't mentioned is to pick some favorite tags that you're an expert in and add them to your favorites list (in the main page right sidebar).

This will highlight questions with those tags when you view the list of Newest questions, and it will even filter the list of selected questions when you view the Stack Overflow home page so that you see more questions with your favorite tags. By focusing your attention on your favorite tags, you'll see more questions that you're interested in and may be able to answer. You'll also be better able to suggest good edits to questions in your area of expertise.

You can also block tags for languages that you don't know by adding them to your Ignored tags list. By default, questions with Ignored tags will just be greyed out, but you can hide them entirely from the Preferences tab in your profile.

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If you need a little bit of inspiration, here are a few users that have gained a lot of reputation in a relatively short amount of time, despite not having joined the site at the very beginning:

• akrun - Member for 2 years, 6 months with over 220,000 reputation
• Wiktor Stribi?ew - Member for 2 years, 5 months with over 150,000 reputation
• Jean-Fran?ois Fabre - Member for only 6 months, but already has over 24,000 reputation

What do they all have in common? They answer tons of questions!