What is the main motivation for top high rating users / moderators on StackExchange to help the community with answering questions?

Question

Is it just the joy of giving back or you're just happy to learn new things while answering questions and figuring out things for others?

I'll appreciate hearing different opinions and views.

Answer 1

There isn't a single reason for me to contribute. So let me give you some of them:

1. I like networking. That means I like talking/writing about networking too. This is one of the outlets for me to do so. It can simply be fun when you help someone to understand something they didn't.
2. Shared networking knowledge typically makes my life/job better. There is a lot of "fear of unknown" and/or "utility indifference" (i.e. when people don't think about something they depend on such as power when you flip a switch or water when you turn on a faucet) when it comes to networking. Neither of these help me on the job or in life, so dispelling some of that is almost always of benefit. There are very few times when sharing networking knowledge has caused me more problems.
3. Answering questions from others tends to refresh or cement information I already learned. As I answer questions, I often dig back into standards, RFCs, and other sources of information I may not have touched in a while. Sometimes I am able to learn more as I do so by correlating those resources with information I have learned since I last used that resource.
4. Questions/answers I am not clear on can help me to learn new things or keep me cognizant of different aspects of networking that I don't directly deal with myself.

Answer 2

I hold a very deep belief that knowledge should flow freely and should be shared.

So I try to contribute to an environment where many find help and bits of knowlegde, sometimes even outright expert advice. Of the my sites, I found StackExchange to be one of the best.

Over the years, working with other disciplines of IT, I came to understand (whith a wink) that the networking guys are often perceived as practitioners of a somewhat black art, rummaging in the IT world's lower layers (pun intended, and a bad one, I'll admit) where no one seems to quite fully understand what they're doing. But everyone knows that things go horribly wrong if they mess up.

But networking is nothing of this dark sort. The most basic things in networking are exactly that: Very simple, are right or wrong, 1 or 0. But once the apprentice knows his packets from his frames and get a grasp on what encapsulation is, a lot of things just follow from there.

I aim to shine a modest light into this allegedly dark closet of the IT world. The more IT people know more about networking, the brighter a place it will become.

Naw... of course it's all for the fame and the money ;-)

Other than that, I probably err on the joy of giving (back) side