I’ve never signed up for a Stack Exchange site (or any other similar platform) before, so the process was quite new to me. As I browsed through the available sites, I noted which ones seemed particularly interesting/relevant, such as Travel, Expatriates, French language, Parenting, and English language. The process of choosing which communities to join, however, took longer than I expected. Although there were several sites that interested me, I found that the questions that were asked required highly specific knowledge/expertise. So in the end, I signed up for Lifehacks and Puzzling (for fun).

Since I was a completely new user, I started out with only 1 reputation point, which limited the types of interactions I could engage in. For instance, after browsing through some questions on the Lifehacks site, I wanted to upvote answers that I found creative or practical, but could not do so since I lacked the points. Thus, the gamification of an open, user-based information system was highly effective for me, as it motivated me to try and accumulate these points.

I started out by answering a few questions in Lifehacks. I strategically chose questions that only had a few answers, with the hopes of increasing my chances of being upvoted. Nothing changed for the first few hours after my responses. Eventually, I received a notification that I had gained +15 points because the original user who had asked the question selected my answer as the best! (Best out of 2, but still felt good nonetheless). Although my answer wasn’t that innovative or exciting, I had noticed that other answers with links to resources tended to have more upvotes, so I incorporated that technique into my own response. 

I also submitted a few edit suggestions to previously-posted questions, mostly correcting grammar mistakes (since I still did not have enough points to upvote/downvote or comment).

I wanted to ask some questions on the Lifehacks site, but found most of my questions had been asked already in some other form – perhaps I’m just not creative enough to think of an entirely new question for this? 

I enjoyed seeing the types of questions and answers that were already posted on these sites. Some of them were unexpectedly specific and detailed, especially on sites like Parenting and Travel. The posts on Puzzling were also quite interesting, as users built off each other’s answers to solve/decrypt puzzles that others had created and posted. Overall, the experience highlighted the power and potential of such platforms for enabling individuals to easily form and participate in new groups (at minimal cost) – principles that were highlighted by Clay Shirky in ‘Here Comes Everybody’.