Hacker News Reader

Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

This is insane. They must be super-efficient because I can't give an SO-quality answer to a question in under an hour.

I can see the appeal though. I used to spend my spare time in uni answering questions on SO. I actually learned a ton about how to conduct research, which is probably one the most useful skills I have in my toolbox.

View on HN

I've noticed a trend, some people answer with what should be a comment and then progressively edit their answer while hogging the attention of the questioner and anyone coming to view the page. For some reason people are loath to downvote an early answer without competition, even if it's rubbish.

Yep. I Do this quite a lot in the Cross Validated site. It is the only way to get up votes or the correct answer check. If you take too much time to craft a well thought out answer, somebody will beat you to it and get all those. So in order to get the best of both worlds, I anser fast and then, if needed, improve on it.

>For some reason people are loath to downvote an early answer without competition, even if it's rubbish.

Yeah, that's because downvoting answers cost reputation. If not for that, people would be waaay more willing to downvote

... but that would also bring a practice of downvoting good answer made by others to boost your own

You can do it faster if you restrict yourself to questions that you already have researched. That is, to questions about bugs like ones you've fixed in your own code, or features you've found out how to use.

whats ur username on SO?

Voting by user is against the rules of Stack Overflow; if you intend to upvote this user's posts in order to reward them, the votes will be reverted and you might face disciplinary action.

How would the platform distinguish those votes from regular ones?

As a network moderator, I actually know the answer to this, so I'm not going to openly speculate. Suffice to say, the rule is there for a reason (voting-by-user messes up the ordering of answers to each individual question), so please don't try a clever workaround just because you think you can.

Navigating to an answer from the user's page only "shadow votes" it for you, it doesn't get counted.

As a YouTuber, this has happened to me multiple times. It's fans or people trolling, they always remove the points though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com