As a junior developer for two years now, what frustrates me is not the responses to the questions I ask. I almost never had the urge to ask any questions, most of them are already asked and answered in a similar enough form so I can learn from them.

What do frustrates me is how I, as a newbie, am incapable of contributing to the site.

I can't upvote an answer that was particularly good to my case. Dozens (literally dozens) of times I clicked to upvote an answer that was just the right one for my case and it wasn't the accepted or most upvoted answer. Only to get this as a reply:

- "Thanks for the feedback! Votes cast by those with less than 15 reputation are recorded, but do not change the publicly displayed post score."

What?? As a junior learning through an answer, I want to contribute it right away and acknowledge the person who helped it. As well as signalizing to other people that that answer is a good one. Why my upvote do not count? I don't understand the reason behind this design decision.

Then I try to comment on the answer to make it explicit how it helped me and I get:

- "You must have 50 reputation to comment"

This rule at least I kind of understand the logic (avoid spamming, flamewars maybe?), but it does not make it any less frustrating.

I cannot contribute to the site and to the people that helped me so much at the beginning of my learning path.

I can Ask, Answer and Edit without any reputation threshold. But those are precisely what a junior developer will most likely not want to do while learning the basic stuff through SO.

These design choices made me totally give up of any urge to participate in SO and I only consult the answers without engaging or recognizing any of the humans that helped me.