I guess I always thought it was a fool's errand to contribute to some company's corpus of knowledge which they will surely sell or profit from, and the only reward is an integer somewhere gets incremented. But it turns out the content on StackOverflow is licensed to the community in some way. So, I don't really have an excuse anymore.
Try just being helpful to other people and not worrying about reputation points and badges and who's going to use the answer for what potentially commercial purpose.
It can be pretty rewarding to have someone thank you profusely for helping them figure something out. And you can learn a lot too -- sometimes to answer a question I'll have to actually go and research it a bit, or make a JSFiddle, that kind of thing.
