How does a new superuser increase their reputation?

Question

As the title states, how does a new superuser increase their reputation to the point where they can start helping others and up-voting good help responses from other superusers?

Answer 1

How does a new superuser increase their reputation?

First, please take some time to read the articles in our help centre. There you will find:

How do I earn reputation?

The primary way to gain reputation is by posting good questions and useful answers. Votes on these posts cause you to gain (or sometimes lose) reputation. Please note that votes for posts marked “community wiki” do not generate any reputation.

You gain reputation when:

• question is voted up: +10
• answer is voted up: +10
• answer is marked “accepted”: +15 (+2 to acceptor)
• suggested edit is accepted: +2 (up to +1000 total per user)
• bounty awarded to your answer: + full bounty amount
• one of your answers is awarded a bounty automatically: + half of the bounty amount (see more details about how bounties work)
• site association bonus: +100 on each site (awarded a maximum of one time per site)

Source What is reputation? How do I earn (and lose) it? - Help Center - Super User

Note that the first few posts by a new user go into the First Posts queue:

The First Posts queue contains the first few posts made by new users (who will probably need help learning to use the site).

Users with the Access Review Queues privilege will be able to:

Edit the post, flag it, vote on it, add a comment, or upvote a previously existing comment.

and so provide you with guidance on improving your first few posts.

Related:

• FAQ for Stack Exchange sites - Meta Stack Exchange
• Privileges - Super User
• Privileges - Remove new user restrictions
• How do I ask a good question? - Help Center - Super User
• How do I write a good answer? - Help Center - Super User
• Why do I need 50 reputation to comment? What can I do instead?.

Answer 2

I'm not actually going to downvote for, as the floating help tag says "This question shows no research effort" but in order to get far enough into this site to have posted your question you must have ignored at least 6 guidance points, pop-ups & floating help tags designed to aid you in this initial discovery; so the answer is really
"don't ignore stuff set up to actually help you".

Answer 3

One thing that worked well for me was asking a fairly complex and non-straightforward question (Can a website in itself be dangerous?). After many comments and answers, my reputation rocketed from around 25 to the current 510. So, I would recommend asking a question like that, preferably one that sparks debate, and then accept one answer. This will give you more reputation. But keep in mind that there is more than upvoting to the StackExchange network: As pointed out by @Mokubai, it is mostly about answering. Giving helpful answers will help you out slowly but surely.

Answer 4

I'm a new superuser as well and was able to raise my reputation a bid by asking a first question, which at least showed some research and own efforts. If others find it reasonable or useful in general or asked the same themselves, this might be as well a reason for a up-vote.

But most importantly you are able to answer questions without any reputation and gain up-votes, hence reputation for your helpful answers. I found it a bid aggravating that new users cannot create comments on foreign questions, e.g. to ask for some clarification or to just give a little research hint or source, but instead they can only answer in a generic way to cover the lack of details, until a reputation of 50 has been gained. The rationale behind this is linked by DavidPostills answer.