I think it depends on the type of community that you participate in. If you work only in relatively unchanging technologies that everyone else works in (like .NET or Java), the OP is probably right. All of the nooks and crannies are exposed and answered. But if you participate in one of the smaller communities (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Io, etc).
I think the number of "niche communities" in the long tail are much larger and more vibrant than the OP supposes. Chances are that it's just the OPs pet technologies that don't get a lot of traffic.
I follow RSS feeds on a number of tags that I find interesting and answer a few questions every week.
From the start in 2008 through now, my reputation curve has been a pretty straight line:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/8912?tab=reputationhistory#ta...
I think it depends on the type of community that you participate in. If you work only in relatively unchanging technologies that everyone else works in (like .NET or Java), the OP is probably right. All of the nooks and crannies are exposed and answered. But if you participate in one of the smaller communities (Groovy, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Io, etc).
I think the number of "niche communities" in the long tail are much larger and more vibrant than the OP supposes. Chances are that it's just the OPs pet technologies that don't get a lot of traffic.
I follow RSS feeds on a number of tags that I find interesting and answer a few questions every week.