Comment by OtterCoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OtterCoder | Hacker News Reader

This article doesn't even touch the worst problem with SO. Code rot.

Answers are typically out of date and no longer good practice. Some claim that the ability to edit answers fixes this, but all it does is subvert the accept/vote functions. You end up with strange "Ship of Theseus" answers where what is written has nothing to do with what was so highly voted, or what solved the original problem.

Where SO goes wrong is that they have tried to create a definitive set of answers in a field where the real answers change yearly, or even monthly.

Right, that also interacts with the game-ification, distorting people's incentives for answering questions.

If the site's goal is to have one problem solved forever with one top answer, then whoever manages to secure that top answer wins [0] a kind of dedicated reputational income stream, indefinitely.

Basically, I think it rewards fast answers over good answers, and rewards easy popular questions over hard specific ones. I wonder what would happen if there was a hard limit on how much reputation you could get from a particular question or answer.

[0] Unless another powerful user changes it into a "community wiki" answer, which may or may not be fair to do.

On the contrary, my longer, in-depth answers tend to score much higher (>10x) than my less in-depth answers; compare

    https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=1
    https://stackoverflow.com/users/1763356/veedrac?tab=answers&sort=votes&page=16

All a reputation cap per answer would do for me is discourage writing good answers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com