Before SO, you had to visit blogs, forums and "programming resources" websites of vastly varying quality. Most of the examples were poorly formatted and not very elaborately explained. Most forums were run by well-knit communities and had a somewhat hostile attitude to newcomers asking a single question.
This is not an issue in SO – if you write a well-formatted and clear question that may also be beneficial to other people, no one is going to look down on you for having 1 reputation point. You can also find reliable answers to common problems, since these posts become very popular and have strong peer review. An answer at the top with a few hundred upvotes is pretty much "copy-paste safe" :-)
The negative side is that people become too lazy and stop bothering with reading long documentation and articles, which can, IMO, help you build the big picture better, in case you can afford the time.
This is not an issue in SO – if you write a well-formatted and clear question that may also be beneficial to other people, no one is going to look down on you for having 1 reputation point. You can also find reliable answers to common problems, since these posts become very popular and have strong peer review. An answer at the top with a few hundred upvotes is pretty much "copy-paste safe" :-)
The negative side is that people become too lazy and stop bothering with reading long documentation and articles, which can, IMO, help you build the big picture better, in case you can afford the time.