It was the first time I was using Stack Exchange, and I honestly found it quite similar to other platforms I have seen/used in the past including Reddit and Quora. When entering the site, I found the options for the different “stacks” quite limiting. There were less than 150 sites altogether, and this contributed to the limited type of groups users could join. Nevertheless, I found myself joining 6 different communities: 1. Sports, 2. Academia, 3. Bitcoin, 4. Economics, 5. The Workplace, 6. Personal finance & money.
I posted my first question on the Sports community. Earlier in the day, I was struggling to find some data for my Capstone Project, and I thought maybe it might be a good idea to post the question. In less than an hour, one user responded to it, and gave me links to useful resources. And, a couple of hours later, another person replied to my posting. Someone even “upvoted” my question. I gained a total of 5 reputation points, bringing my total to 6 (you get 1 for joining the community).
I also posted questions in another communities, including one in the Academia one, and another in the Personal finance & money one. While both questions were answered by various individuals, I did not get any reputation points since neither questions were “upvoted” by other users. In most of interactions, it was quite interesting to observe the seriousness of the answers, including comments that pushed for some of my question to be closed because it was apparently “off-topic”. Neverthless, I appreciated some of the answers and they turned out to be quite useful.
I enjoyed the elements of interactivity in the Stack Exchange platform. For one, the “reputation points” was a good system to track and rank users based on contribution. This helped create a structured community with users judged on their usefulness. Users could set targets to reach different levels based on their “reputation points”, and unlocked different sets of skills as they gained more points. At the same time, the “upvote” and “downvote” function helped sustain orderliness in the community. It is also interesting to see how users regulated other users. For example, for my questions in the Academia and Personal finance & money communities, other users commented suggestions that my question was not relevant in the following community and that my question should be titled differently for clearer understanding respectively. My final point is regarding the tag system in Stack Exchange. While posting your question, each user is supposed to set tags on their questions to set them into categories. Hence, when I was answering questions in the Sports community, I chose to answer those that were classified as “football”, since I knew the most information regarding this sport. It was a brilliant way to self-organize questions into categories within each community, something that was reflected in our readings this week (i.e. Here comes everybody).
