Almost at the end of my undergraduate career in university, Stack Exchange has proven to be one of the most useful sites. Whenever I have question regarding homework from a computer science class, programming class, or a math class, chances are someone has posted a similar question on one of the Stack Exchange platforms in the likes of Stack Overflow, Mathematics, etc. Moreover, as a tech enthusiast who often plays around with under-the-hood options of operating systems, the Super User and Ask Ubuntu has proven invaluable in resolving problems ranging from minor tweaks and optimizations to critical failures. Hence, I embarked on this assignment with the expectations that I am well-versed in the Stack Exchange world.  Perhaps here is the place to say Thank You to every user on these sites who has made my life easier! 

One of the main aspects of this challenge was to try a site that I have not used before. Having a passion for photography, the Photography Stack Exchange bulletin board seemed the perfect opportunity to look at something that I have never used before, but I am interested in.

The first thing to do is sign up for the platform. Nowadays that’s just a single redirect to Facebook or Google anyway, I choose Facebook because my account there does not contain any personal information and I prefer to give out the least amount to any online service whenever possible, for privacy reasons. 

Being signed in automatically, I was already greeted with one message in my inbox – a welcome letter to the bulletin board. This welcome “page” contained a brief yet detailed overview of the site’s functionality, namely how to upvote and downvote posts, how to answer a post, and how to create a new post or tag a post. 

Now the interesting part – the points “reward” system. In a nutshell, your score goes up when others vote up your questions, answers and edits, with each of these adding a different number of points. When you reach a certain number of total points you unlock a new ‘privilege’, such as ability to upvote, comment, vote down, and eventually edit other user’s posts and answers. On top of that, depending on the quality of your contributions, you can receive badges to signify your ‘experience level’. 

At this point, the only privileges I had were to make a post or answer a post. I thought that would be easy, but the interesting part was that most of the questions were extremely technical, specific, or odd. For instance, “Calculate the distance of an object in a picture?” or “Connecting Yongnuo YN968EX-RT speedlight with a YN560IV off-camera”. Needless to say, I couldn’t find any question that I had sufficient technical knowledge or practical experience to answer. There were some questions that I tentatively knew the answer to, but I was afraid to post it in case it was incorrect, as being downvoted would affect my reputation (and I know how annoying it is to spend hours trying to follow a given answer on Stack Exchange only to find out it is wrong).

So, in the end, of the day, I was too scared to write any replies, I did not have any questions to ask, and I couldn’t do much else on the site at that time. I was able to gain a whopping 1 point for signing up for the bulletin board. Moreover, I was able to get 2 whole badges – “informed” for reading the entire tour page, and “autobiographer” for filling in the about section of my profile. Next step is to answer 30 questions from users. Will update in a month!