> if you have enough rep.

This is a substantial part of the fighting over the site, though - there are lengthy guides to picking up enough Stack Overflow rep to render the site usable.

I usually see this dismissed with "just help some people and ask some good questions, you'll be there in no time", but when I talk to friends who are getting a self-taught start with programming, I consistently hear a different story. They're getting questions closed as dupes, either because they aren't experienced enough to recognize duplicate questions with different terms or because mods are squelching their genuinely novel questions. And they're new, so they can't answer hard questions - and the easy ones don't produce rep because they're inevitably closed, removing all the payouts for answering them.

I understand the logic behind the rep gating system, it's not a bad idea. But it's just fuel on the fire when things go wrong, and they go wrong a lot in the form of wrongly closed questions.

Yes it is hard to ask good questions, especially when you are just starting with a technology and lack the proper terminology and mental model - which is the phase where you need to ask the most questions!

Yeah - I don't mean to imply this is all Stack Overflow's problem! I think more could be done, but the 'unknown unknowns' situations is really hard to provide support for with anything short of sitting down one-on-one and working through the topic.