This assignment had proved harder than I have thought it would and in the end I have walked away from it by learning valuable lessons about knowledge itself. 

There are many thousands of questions on different Stackexchange sites that are waiting for answers but I trusted my knowledge that there will be some questions that I will be able to answer, or questions that I can ask that will be meaningful enough to get answered. Both of these things have proven to be more challenging than I expected them to be. 

First I chose the stack exchange sites that were dealing with topics that I was familiar with: vegetarianism, music and life hacks. I have been a vegetarian for 2 years now and I thought that there might be some sort of knowledge that I can share with the world or that I can ask a question that has not yet been answered. Even the Birthday Paradox (Shirky 25) was in support of this thought process. I quickly had to realize how wrong I was about this. 

On lifehacks, I asked about productivity. I have recently started using my screens in black and white after learning about how colors as design elements can try to keep users occupied with the device and its tools. For example the color red is mostly used to signal notifications since it is the color that stands out the most to the eye. Most of the time this is used to help the user experience, however it can disrupt the flow of consciousness of the user, causing them to use the app as many times as they see the red sign of notifications. Eliminating the color can help the user to focus on the content and individual decisions. I decided to ask for some clarification about this on lifehacks, since this seemed to be aligning with the agenda of this particular stack exchange. 

As of now my question had 17 views and one comment. 

I quickly realized that this is not the right question to ask and after all lifehacks are not my area of expertise. I started going through the questions and the depth and specificity of them astounded me. These were more or less questions that were just as perplexing to me as they were to the people who asked them.

My experience on the Music Stack Exchange and Vegetarianism was slightly different. I did not have a genuine question in mind, but my hopes of helping someone who was learning how to play the guitar led me to browsing the questions on the site. After browsing these sites I realized that there are very few questions that I can actually attempt to answer and there’s only a few questions that I can ask. In a desperate attempt to tackle some questions and ear some “respect” I went on the English Language and Math Stack Exchange sites. Similarly, there were no questions that I could properly answer.

To sum up my experience, I found that there are 3 types of questions:

1. The questions for experts. 
2. The questions with easy answers asked by absolute rookies. 
3. The questions that do not get answered. 

The questions for experts is a category where it is almost impossible for the average user to answer the questions. Whenever I tried to interact with these question I had to realize that my knowledge is simply too shallow to be able to meaningfully answer a question. All my answers can be easily googled and the research that would go into answering the question just doesn’t pay off. 

The questions with easy answers — well, they get answered really quickly. And the quality of the answers is very high. These questions receive answers in minutes after their creation and the accepted answers come from seasoned veterans of the site with very clear explanations. 

And there are the questions that will remain unanswered for the longest time. An honorable mention was asked on the Stack Exchange Movies:

This question asks about a film that came out 14 years ago and its financial information is not available. I tried to look for an answer for the respect points but there was nothing to be found. The question was also downvoted by the moderators. 

To conclude with, the Stack Exchange sites have amazing potential. The knowledge that they offer is catered by experts. The communities have strong ties around the topic that they cover and even thought it takes time to earn the respect of the community the effort will pay off by obtaining knowledge that is singular through the world.