
Ask HN: Do you have any kind of “strategy” for StackOverflow questions? - szatkus
I wanted to play a bit with SO. Seems like helping people could be a nice way to learn something new about tools I&#x27;m using as well as doing something good for the world.<p>Anyway there are a few problems. Sometimes when I write an answer, with a proper explanation, a solution and usually some links to docs, there suddenly appears a message that there is a new answer to the question. And usually it&#x27;s as good as mine, so I don&#x27;t even bother with sending it. It&#x27;s a bit demotivating.<p>When I tried to browse questions without answers that were asked longer than 30 minutes ago there are usually just a bunch of badly formulated questions.<p>Do you have any tips how to effectievely browse StackOverflow?
======
KKPMW
I no longer contribute, but when I did my most upvoted answers were the ones I
wrote on old and very popular questions. So one strategy is to order questions
by the number of votes, go through them and see if you have an alternative
answer that is not yet posted on the question. Doing this you will not have to
rush writing your answer. Your reputation will start increasing at a slower
pace, but the increase will be more stable as there are lots of people that
get referred to the most upvoted questions over and over again.

For new questions there are two strategies. First is to post a sketch of an
answer first, and then edit and edit and edit to add more content to it. This
way OP will see the core of it quickly and can upvote and nobody will "scoop"
you on it. Second strategy is to write detailed and elaborate answer so that
when your answer appears it will outshine the rivals by being the most
comprehensive and most deep.

But frankly, nowadays, I feel like 95% of newly posted questions are
duplicates and should be closed, yet aren't because even high rep users prefer
to post a quick answer for some points, instead of going through the (as of
yet unrewarded) effort to close the answer properly.

Also a lot depends on the tag.

~~~
szatkus
Thanks.

Fun fact: I've just typed a random problem into Duck and selected the first
result from StackOverflow. The top answer is at 238 right now. Then I checked
it in archive.org at random points at time and it seems that reputation growth
was slow, but almost linear. Amazing. And I was wondering why SO posts I
stumbled upon had so many upvotes, when the fresh questions and answers rarely
have more than just couple of upvotes :)

