It's kind of like Craigslist for me in that random people like me are also the source of poor-quality and low-effort participation, one-sentence or obviously-homework questions. However, I do realize the structure of the site and the Ponzi-like nature of voting there makes the n00b experience difficult if you want points and privileges. But at the end of the day, question choice and moderation are the comb and brush of informative crowd-driven sites.
That said, I assume there is plenty of action to be had if you're participating in cutting edge, new version, or new technology topics. Unfortunately that conflicts with the low-effort/homework population who I assume are constrained by their curriculum and so they have only C++ questions to ask. By that token I wonder how many questions even remain to be asked of common and popular topics like Java. It could just be that SO is "full" in certain topics.
The way to grow an economy is to participate in the economy, but this acquistion is no doubt going to change things for me.
I also speculate that there's a certain mindset that sees unmonetized ratings (or even points) as a market failure, which is what generated acquisition interest.
I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least give them that?
Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma for the privilege of answer questions for complete strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it reminds me of the powertripping that you see on Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less room for interpretation when most of the questions are technical in nature.
https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges
You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new site you get 100 points by default which means you always have those base privileges wherever you are.
At the same time, google search results are massively less useful now and if I don't get a hit, I'm going to reach out to the source.
To that extent, I think SO has the same problem as Google - it will regress to the mean.
This is also because google search results will be flooded with SO mirrors that rerender content but with more ads.
On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes.
I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes.
Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y.
If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
[In particular, I don't have an account in SO.]
