I'd like to point out that while I definitely did not write this post, I did feel it easy to relate, because it seems hard at this point to gain reputation without gaming the system a bit. But there are so many ways to get involved...I think the best seems to be being knowledgeable in a very specific area of expertise - answering C# questions is really tough, but if you know Heroku, there are so many more questions there without answers that you can really gobble up quite a bit of reputation by knowing something niche.
All the while one does not / is not able to answer questions, he can learn from the answers that have already been submitted, no reputation gained but knowledge (I have heard people compiling e-books on the best posts from Stackoverflow). I call that a step forward.
