By posting questions or answers, especially ones which get upvoted.
Comments are, intentionally, treated as lower value by the site. They're intended for discussing and correcting issues which may exist with a question or answer, not for revealing new information.
The point is that SO is missing out here.
> The point is that SO is missing out here.
Unfortunately, if comments were open to all initially the site would quickly fill with “me too” comments and other things that would fill the page with low quality content that would be effort to moderate. This already happens to an extent with answers.
My point being that the potential gain from automatically open comments may be less than the potential hassle from less useful users. Balancing these matters is difficult, many places get it even more wrong than SO and related sites do, and there is probably no perfect answer that doesn't put off some useful contributions.
Why can’t we highlight specific content and create a discussion thread hinged off the highlighted part?
Creating a properly written, end-to-end answer for a complex question is an heroic task if all you wanted to point out was that there was a demonstrably better way to do Item 15(a)(5)(iii) and the author missed it.
It’s funny that we, collectively as programmers, use git all day long to solve this problem for modifying discrete blocks of programming language text with discussion and more, but can’t seem to ever apply the same tools and fascination to written English.
Even more interesting now that we use the best answers to train models. You’d think there would be more discipline involved in making the best answer even bestier. (Like, say, Wikipedia)
... though note also that once you get karma on one site you get some base karma on all sites.
You only need reputation to have your edits applied immediately, without review. You can suggest edits at any rep level (even while logged out).
You don't need karma to comment on your own questions/answers (i.e. in reply to someone else's comment on what you posted).
Basically anyone can flag comments obsolete and this can make them be deleted without review.
My last comment was "this code breaks for obscure input X" but I can no longer locate it.
The real main problem with StackOverflow is that all the easy questions have already been asked and answered, and all the hard questions get little attention, so it's hard to get karma honestly. Many people have luck operating in obscure language tags.