11 ms·

Catching all the pointzz (it also has badges!!) can be a problem. Especially on SO itself, there can be a race to answer a question, which means the quality of

Catching all the pointzz (it also has badges!!) can be a problem. Especially on SO itself, there can be a race to answer a question, which means the quality of the answers suffers sometimes. Difficult questions really don't work well, sadly. Unless there is the rare situation that some expert out there happens to know the answer and has the spare time to post a long detailed reply. Didn't realise you couldn't answer your own questions without sufficient rep - that sounds a bit rubbish. Don't think you get any points from it either (obviously, otherwise you could just rapidly post a bunch of empty 'questions' and accept all your own answers). Ultimately, stack-exchange sites seem to work well for a certain volume of questions, with a certain minimum number of enthusiastic varied experts in some field, for a certain level of question (not homework, not blue-sky research). This is kind of Goldilocks-obvious I suppose...

blakeyrat 11y ago
Right; but the thing is, the only questions I ever have are the difficult questions. Easy questions are either: * Something I can figure out myself if I think about it for a few minutes, or * Already on StackOverflow or another Q&A site so I can look them up. IMO if the site doesn't tackle difficult questions, what's the point? I don't need yet another site for easy questions, I need a Q&A site to get my questions answered. RE: the answering my own question thing - Yeah, the people in control of the site all have like 573453247,3048294723847 rep so they think nothing of saying "well doing action X should require rep" followed by the old canard, "it's really easy to get that much rep!" I seriously wonder if any of those people have actually created a new account and tried to use their own website. Because there's SO MANY LIMITATIONS on SO MANY THINGS tied to rep, if you come in from the outside there's actually very little you can actually do. And there's no way to ease-in to using the site, because you can't (for example) post comments on other people's answers until after you gain rep. So if you're like me, and you have no patience/desire to play the internetpointzzz game, nor did you start using the site "early enough" to benefit from its population growth, and the fact that early users could do a LOT more without rep limits-- then you're kind of just stuck in this weird no-man's land. (I didn't use the site when it was founded because of it's bizarre and foolish insistence on using OpenID. Thankfully they've finally moved away from that.) Theoretically, I could gain rep (by playing the game), then add a "bounty" to my difficult questions to get them answered, but I ain't got time for that! Who does?

blakeyrat 11y ago

Right; but the thing is, the only questions I ever have are the difficult questions. Easy questions are either: * Something I can figure out myself if I think about it for a few minutes, or * Already on StackOverflow or another Q&A site so I can look them up. IMO if the site doesn't tackle difficult questions, what's the point? I don't need yet another site for easy questions, I need a Q&A site to get my questions answered. RE: the answering my own question thing - Yeah, the people in control of the site all have like 573453247,3048294723847 rep so they think nothing of saying "well doing action X should require rep" followed by the old canard, "it's really easy to get that much rep!" I seriously wonder if any of those people have actually created a new account and tried to use their own website. Because there's SO MANY LIMITATIONS on SO MANY THINGS tied to rep, if you come in from the outside there's actually very little you can actually do. And there's no way to ease-in to using the site, because you can't (for example) post comments on other people's answers until after you gain rep. So if you're like me, and you have no patience/desire to play the internetpointzzz game, nor did you start using the site "early enough" to benefit from its population growth, and the fact that early users could do a LOT more without rep limits-- then you're kind of just stuck in this weird no-man's land. (I didn't use the site when it was founded because of it's bizarre and foolish insistence on using OpenID. Thankfully they've finally moved away from that.) Theoretically, I could gain rep (by playing the game), then add a "bounty" to my difficult questions to get them answered, but I ain't got time for that! Who does?