lurking: It's mostly a great way to stumble upon interesting concepts and questions that I either wouldn't have thought of or would not have actively sought out myself. For instance, on the lighter side, I have a fascination with the age of sail drawn from popular media (Master and Commander, Moby Dick, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc.) and I often see a highly upvoted topic on the front page and a deep dive by someone like /u/jschooltiger will inevitably pop up. It's also given me direction to figure out where i should start digging personally into the literature. e.g. I was interested in learning more about the history of counterterrorism and easily stumbled upon a great write up involving the Malay emergency and turned that post into a list of books i checked out from the library.

There's also just something enjoyable about reading something by someone who very clearly loves a subject and relishes being able to share it with a larger group of people.

answering:

I like sharing what I know and helping people figure problems out. Most of the questions I answer are about topics that are fairly relevant to modern life but aren't covered in high school or well covered in gov/history 101. Sometimes this involves me re-purposing notes and books I've previously collected and sometimes it just involves me knowing about free publicly available sources and sharing that information alongside of an answer to the person asking the question.