Comment by zahlman

> a question that nobody else had answered in 5 years... but because I didn't have enough ridiculous "reputation" I couldn't post it

This is frankly impossible. By default, anyone with an account can post an answer to a question (https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges/create-posts).

Question protection sets a barrier at 10 reputation, which you can get from a single upvote on an existing answer, or from five approved edits to existing questions or answers. Further, it would only be applied to questions that had already been answered repeatedly, specifically because the question was attracting redundant answers that weren't adding any more value.