I stopped contributing to stackoverflow, but it's not declining
Stackoverflow works great for me, and I don&#x27;t know why more people don&#x27;t appear to use it like I do.<p>1) When you&#x27;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.<p>2) 1.5% of the time, stackoverflow will have a related question, but either it doesn&#x27;t have an answer, or the answer has issues.<p>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.<p>3) The remaining 0.5% of the time, you get nothing.   You post a question, but of course nobody answers because it&#x27;s an esoteric, hard question.  24 hours later you post an answer to your own question, or more likely a crappy workaround.<p>And eventually somebody posts a great answer to your question.   (Once this happened to me &gt;3 years after I posted it!)   It&#x27;s way too late for you, but it will help the next person with the same problem.<p>You don&#x27;t get a lot of karma quickly this way since you&#x27;re posting esoteric stuff, but you do tend to pick up some badges that are designed to reward this sort of behaviour, like &quot;Populist&quot; and &quot;Necromancer&quot;.   You do pick up karma slowly and steadily, though.   What&#x27;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.<p>If you answer an easy question, you&#x27;ve saved somebody a few minutes.   When you answer a hard one, you&#x27;ve saved hours or days.