My only interaction with Stack Exchange prior to this assignment were the questions that would pop up whenever I googled an engineering problem that I was stuck on. For that purpose, the website has always been useless to me since most questions are extremely specific and irrelevant to my own inquiries. I never thought of posting in fear of asking something too trivial for such a knowledgeable community. Basically, I didn’t know much about the website, and I was a bit intimidated by it.
I already knew going in that the answers provided would be incredibly well-researched, complex, and detailed compared to many other Q&A platforms. On top of that, the questions are rarely easy to answer, as they are often obscure or require someone with expertise. I spent some time going through the different communities, which to my surprise included more than just engineering, coding, and math. The communities varied in their levels of user interactions and even strictness, but all followed the general rule of “just questions and answers” as well as the same voting process (most voted answer goes to top). I think it’s a very interesting take on eliminating distractions and off-topic discussions that appear in any other forum, as both the person asking the question and future readers can directly access the answers they want. Also, some light discussion can occur in a non-distracting manner as comments. I ended up joining the Woodworking, Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and French Language communities.
I know very little about Woodworking, but there was a genuine question that Raitis and I had during our work on SDME (building a house): is this expensive power tool going to blow up? I rephrased that into a proper question and initially got a comment telling me to add more information on the tool, which I provided to the best of my ability. That same person then provided a detailed answer complete with technical jargon and concepts that I never even knew existed. Needless to say, after some googling to clarify the answer’s terminology, I ended up learning a lot about saw blades from a complete stranger who had no incentive other than an urge to help other strangers on the Internet (and maybe earn some fake pixel points). I ended up selecting that answer as the best one.
Edit: the post ended up attracting more attention than I thought, with more than just one solution to my issue.
After that, I took a quick look at the Engineering community and it crushed me. The questions were much more practical than my experience in university and far beyond my level of knowledge, so I moved on hoping that one day my education will amount to something. I then decided to post a past problem from one of my engineering courses to Electrical Engineering just to see how quickly users can solve a difficult problem, but was relieved to see that a commenter was as confused as I was. This wasn’t as positive of an experience as the woodworking one, but because of its technical nature it might take more time to answer.
I then tried to find a question that I could answer myself, which took a while, but eventually I answered a French language question on how to reserve a table at a restaurant, which was relatively straightforward. The post did not have any other interactions and only 12 views at the time of writing this, possibly due to the simplicity of the question (maybe Stack Exchange users prefer to be challenged than earn easy points?) or the relative lack of activity in that specific community.
As much as I loved learning about saw blades, I enjoyed “lurking” around communities more. Some questions are genuinely interesting with informative answers, and others are just weird/fun. It was difficult to impress anyone enough to get upvoted, probably because I’m not a woodworker, a practicing engineer, or good at French, but I was able to learn something and teach something in return. It definitely sounds like a rewarding loop, and I see myself coming back every once in a while whenever I have an impossible question to ask or to one day find an engineering question that I can answer, but not much else.