Some advice from me to ease your experience on SO:
1. Earn some reputation first in order to see how stuff works from the other side. When you join a new company, you don't come the first day and tell everyone how they're doing it wrong before learning about the project, about the tradeoffs etc. Same here.
Having rep above certain threshold gives you additional privileges (commenting, editing etc.).
Also, when you have a rep over few hundred, I'm more likely to even read your question.
Most questions from 0-rep users are very basic same-stuff-again / low-quality questions that are not challenging to answer.
Moreover, when you have some points, you can put a bounty on your question, which means you really want to have a good answer for that and can make a sacrifice, and makes the question stand out (on a separate bounty-enabled-questions page). This gives more incentive to others to look at your question. There's nothing more soul crushing on SO than taking time to write an elaborate answer and getting 0 upvotes, because the guy forgot to upvote or whatever because he doesn't care.
2. It's a misconception that you need to "respond very fast" to the questions to get the rep.
Everyone has a different strategy, and well I spent some time a few years ago using this strategy to get some initial reputation.
But I stopped some 5 years ago. I almost never play the "fastest gun in the west". I google things that I encounter during my normal
daily work, and keep the tab open. If the best answer is not satisfactory, and later I come up with something better, I write it down
as a new answer, and perhaps if I found similar problem in multiple SO questions, I put a comment with a cross-link to my answer in other thread.
You really need very little effort to get SO rep as a part of your normal daily work, yet everything I talk to seem amazed "wow how come you have so much rep on Stack!".
Just create a damn account, be always logged in, and don't keep your solutions for yourself.
3. Try to put up an exhaustive question, write down a SMALL, reproducible scenario, explore some options yourself (ask yourself
"what did I try?").
A lot of newcomers put very vague questions, very little information, it's not fun to ask someone a ten clarifying questions.
4. I felt really bad when I got my first downvote but it was indeed a bad answer, to a different question than the OP asked.
I learnt the lesson and I don't read in haste anymore. It's good to be humbled sometimes.
Regarding "closing as duplicate", it's true some mods are too eager, but if it makes sense, I believe dupe questions should be closed - duplication is not good (DRY) and best code is no code, if possible.