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Comment by yen223 | Hacker News Reader

StackOverflow ranks answers based on how many upvotes it gets. In other words, it establishes a user's credibility based on his answers' popularity...

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Yeah, but popularity on StackOverflow is related to "does it work for me," a metric that ultimately depends on evaluation by an impartial machine (or a human using their knowledge of the impartial machine to perform the same evaluation). You can't get popular on SO by answering with random snippets from TAOCP.

Or maybe you can and I'm missing a business opportunity. A TAOCP+OraclePropaganda bot sounds like something that might make bags and bags of money.

How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for? How do you know a GitHub starred/watched repository is really useful and not some job applicant's astroturfing campaign to make it look like their code is widely-used?

>How do you know the up-votes on a StackOverflow answer were not fake/bots/paid for?

Because the quality of the top voted answers speaks for themselves in 99% of the ocassions.

I disagree, I find surprisingly often, the top one or two voted answers have low quality in many of the types of searches I end up doing on StackOverflow. Ultimately, it ends up being a resonable ranking when you have a smaller set of answers, and a good mod(?) community that's effective at filtering out actual spam.

Sometimes a longstanding answer has so many upvotes that it stays at the top even if it's no longer the best answer. In cases like that, there's usually a comment that explains why that method is no longer preferred and what you should do instead -- sometimes pointing to the better answer. And if no such comment exists, be kind and add it.

The more elementary the question, the more upvotes you get. So your credibility is also dependent on the superficiality of the questions you are answering, even more so I'd say.

This is the problem: SO ends up favoring more shallow knowledge as time marches on.

You can't use popularity metrics to mean anything substantive.

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