The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).
I do feel like the parent.
Are you being serious here?
I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.
I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.
If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience.
> The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote.
This is true, but not relevant, I don't think many people care. Some might, but not many.