I understand that can be frustrating, but as you mentioned part of that is by design. Stack Overflow gets its success by being laser-focused on questions and answers, to the extreme that comments like "thanks" are seen as noise for developers to wade through to find the answers they are looking for. That's why they have such a high bar to comment - the number of "thanks" and "this solved my problem" comments would be a staggering moderation issue. Either that or the site would turn into a long-winded discussion forum.

In short, only questions and answers add any real value to the site for the most part. If you really want to contribute to the community, consider diving in and writing questions and answers.

As for upvoting, I understand that it's frustrating not to be able to vote in a community that you spend so much time in. But on the flip side, realize that 90% of the value of Stack Overflow comes from its questions and answers. If you want to contribute to the site, it only takes 3 upvotes across all your questions (or 2 across all your answers) to gain the upvote privilege permanently.

50 rep requirement for commenting is too high. Very often I have follow up question to ask the answerer but I can't and SO discourage private chat. That leaves me the only option of asking the question again. And of course it gets marked "duplicated" even though I emphasize a specific aspect of the question. At that point I just take a deep breath, close the SO tab, ask that question on Reddit.

If you want to avoid a similar sounding question getting marked as a dupe and closed, you can contextualize your question with the similar answers to show that you've searched and read them.

For example, "I've read the answers to A, B, C (linked) and they get me this far, but now I'm trying to take that output and output it to YAML" etc.

As mods / queue reviewers, we generally assume someone has not read (or found) similar questions if they don't mention this. I don't vote to close many questions as dupes unless it's clear the asker didn't even try to look at the related questions. I tend to close vote only on low effort questions that don't meet the minimal complete verifiable example (MCVE) best practices for asking a question.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/mcve

To the comment on the 50 rep threshold, I believe you can hit this more easily than you think. For example, writing one answer that gets accepted (+15) with 3 upvotes (3x +10) is worth 45 rep. Then giving 3 suggested edits (3x +2) that get accepted is worth 6 to put you over 50. Suggested edits don't have to be big — you can look for common aspects of aging popular answers like outbound links that may now 404 or fixing grammar mistakes. A lot of people on Stack Overflow do not speak English as their first language, so if you do, you can help improve the clarity of their questions or answers which benefits the whole community.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation

Here are some accepted edits I've made for inspiration. Many are simple one liners.

https://stackoverflow.com/users/149428/taylor-edmiston?tab=a...

You get 10 reputations for each upvote you get and 15 if your answer is accepted. It doesn't take more than a few hours to get there.

There's plenty of simple question that you should be able to answer. Use what you know as tags, look out for new posts, and answers them using the best of your knowledge.

Do you get reputation over upvote on question? A few good questions should easily get 5 upvotes.

A few hours? I've been using SO suite of sites for years and only last year did I get over 50 on a single one

The reputation for commenting is way too high. I can't count how many times I could have contributed but for the silly reputation requirement. I've given up trying to contribute.

And based on the answers I've been seeing, it doesn't serve it's purpose anyway.

Earning reputation on Stack Overflow can be a really slow, tiring process. As others have mentioned, suggesting edits is one way to get there. For each that gets accepted, you earn +2 rep. I earned 25 rep this way and it was a slog.

The easiest way to get 100 rep on SO, though, is to get 200 rep on any other site on the network. This is called the Association Bonus. Enjoy movies or cooking or video games or board games? Go post questions/answers on those sites and get some votes. There are 170+ sites on the network and because they're lower-volume, earning rep is often faster because posts are more visible.

I'm not sure which sites you've tried so far, but it is possible to do and even have some fun doing it.

Well then I have been incredibly lucky because I only contributed twice, on simple questions and I got more than 50 without even thinking about it.

FWIW, you can always comment on answers to your own question, even with 1 rep.

The restriction on upvoting is necessary to have any chance of handling vote fraud like users upvoting themselves with socks. If any new account could vote it would be far easier to cheat the system.

15 rep is also a very small barrier. Asking good questions or editing are probably the best ways to start. Editing is certainly something a new user can do, simply fixing the formatting, grammar and typos in new questions will give you 15 rep in no time.

All low hanging fruit were taken. You can ask good questions, but it would be too niche and nobody sees it.

People see your low reputation and will automatically reject your edits with generic reason, even when I gave very detailed explanation in the note.

There are some non-obvious customs when editing answers, that's unlikely to go well as a very new user. But editing questions mostly for formatting and language is certainly doable without any reputation.

I'm assuming the edits are reasonable itself, there are some odd patterns that you see regularly like people using code formatting (monospace font) for emphasis. That kind of edit will get stopped.

Another option to get the basic SO privileges is to ask or answer on any other SE sites. There are many of them, and almost all are much, much easier to participate in.

If people are rejecting legitimately good edits that's a problem. People looking through the review queue should be doing so with an open mind and an eye for the edits, not the person making the edits.

Search for "teh": 7306 results.

And that's only a typo. There's so much stuff that could be fixed...

I believe that's too small of a typo to fix, isn't there a minimum length required when editing?

Yes. I was pointing out that there's still lots of low hanging fruit, rather than this specific typo. But just checking out those questions shows lots of low quality stuff that could be corrected.

15 reputation on Stack Overflow seems easy enough. I got it with a single answer on a low-traffic topic.

500 reputation for full Hacker News privileges, on the other hand, seems like quite the undertaking! I say this as a decade-long reader who still is far below that.

Yeah, low rep restrictions are annoying. I think it's to discourage bot abuse and spam. If you can get 200 rep in any StackExchange site, then joining any other one will give you 100 rep to start off with, so I found it was worth it to answer/edit questions until I hit 200 rep

This was the answer for me. I accumulated 200 rep basically goofing off on codegolf.stackexchange.com and no longer feel hindered on other SE sites even as a mostly-passive user. If that's not your bag there are plenty of other subsites that are accessible to users with few tech chops: puzzling, worldbuilding, rpg, etc.

I found the "You must have 50 reputation to comment" frustrating at the start as well as an answer I was using was wrong as in the code didn't run which took me a while to alter and get it to work and I couldn't point it out. I guess you can get reputation by answering questions but it was annoying. Also as a relative newbie I could only answer quite dumb questions.

Since you found the fix, you could post your update as an answer? With a "sorry I can't comment but here is what I found" disclaimer to your answer.

You could even skip the "sorry I can't comment" bit; just as well to introduce with, "this is what I had to do to make [other answer] work".

Answers are kinda the whole point after all; no shame in writing them...

Yeah guess so. I was new and didn't figure it.

I’ve been a member of stack overflow and programming professionally for over 4 years and still can’t upvote, comment on or answer questions.

I was a member and daily reader of HN for years before I started participating. You don't get down vote capabilities here until a much higher point threshold, and I think it helps. I think it's more likely to cause you to conform a bit to the community rather than clash with or disrupt it.

You see it here occasionally, where someone is getting down voted and they don't know why, and someone will explain its most likely because they aren't acting within community norms (here it's back up factual assertions with sources, keep it civil, if you make a joke keep it topical or follow it up with something useful, don't just post memes, etc. Basically keep the signal to noise high).

Limiting new users for a while when their initial mode of interaction may not fit will with the site is a sane choice, IMO, and if those new users never make the effort to go past that initial hurdle, it may be that their contributions are high enough risk that it's not worth it (or the hurdle could be too high).

Well, to be blunt is say you've been a consumer of SO. There's nothing wrong with this but I'd argue that if you don't have 15 rep after 4 years you've been paid back with the knowledge you've gained.

If you can't find a way to get 50 rep on SO get 200 on any other exchange site and that will credit you 100

That's the problem. I've tried to get rep but it's hard. I have a lot to contribute but no way to do so.

Have you been engaging in actions that potentially earn you reputation points, e.g., editing or answering questions? If not, that's why. If you have, but your contributions have gone unrewarded, that's an SO problem.

Not necessarily a SO problem. Some tags don't have a lot of traffic. Some answers aren't great.

FWIW, the way I was able to bump my reputation up was suggesting edits. It's pretty satisfying spending months learning proper technique and then recognizing small coding inefficiencies made by more experienced coders.

I'm in the same position as you. I ended up answering a few questions and asking one. It took a day, or so, to get up to 64 rep which was more than enough for me.

Have you tried suggesting edits to hit the 50 rep threshold?

I think this is an easy route to hitting 50 rep. See my other comment in this thread for more specific examples of edits that are likely to get accepted.