Stack Overflow was a nice experience for me because I was able to hit 2k reputation fairly quickly, in just 30 days of posting and 6 weeks calendar time. That being said, it never had the community feel of places I spent during my formative years, which were more on forums and IRC.

Here's a conference talk I gave on how to gain Stack Overflow reputation from back in 2018, selected out of 5 submitted talks. It's amazing how fast times have changed from before, during, and now after.

https://grokify.github.io/stackoverflow-the-hard-way/