3 ms·

I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success. This seems to be fundamen

I agree entirely - I've had exactly the same experiences. I think both of them boil down to the site suffering from it's own success. This seems to be fundamentally because once one reasonably correct answer picks up an upvote or two, it often snowballs into picking up many more because future visitors won't add other answers of their own and just upvote that. This leads to there being a significant reward for getting your answer in first - more so than for it to be complete (or, in some cases, correct) - so users aim to answer as fast as possible. As their user base has grown, that time threshold has gone down, and the quality of many of the answers follows it. I don't know what the answer to that is though - maybe there's not one.

mistermann 16y ago
I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one specific ways to game the SO rep system). I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few "little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this. It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.
- eru 16y ago
  > It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system. Or put another way, they just change the mechanics, so that the gaming the system means doing the right thing.
pasbesoin 16y ago
In this and other contexts, I've wondered about the viability of stepped intervals. Accumulate responses, and later further responses and votes, behind the scenes, but only update the published thread every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or some to-be-determined optimal interval (that might change over time / post age, size, etc.).

mistermann 16y ago

I also agree....almost a year ago this problem was actually discussed on the SO podcast (people doing the instantaneous one liner reply in order to get upvotes asap, the problem somewhat originated from a blog post someone did one specific ways to game the SO rep system). I have a similar problem in that I ask questions that are generally "harder" and don't often have a perfectly black and white answer, but I'll get a few "little effort" answers and then they go dead, and I am left with a poor answer acceptance ratio. If I ever eventually figure out a question, I always go back and answer it myself, so really I'm trying to do the right thing as I am a big believer in the site, but I think it misses subtleties like this. It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system.

eru 16y ago
> It's not particularly easy, but I think they could improve things to stop gaming of the system. Or put another way, they just change the mechanics, so that the gaming the system means doing the right thing.

pasbesoin 16y ago

In this and other contexts, I've wondered about the viability of stepped intervals. Accumulate responses, and later further responses and votes, behind the scenes, but only update the published thread every 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, or some to-be-determined optimal interval (that might change over time / post age, size, etc.).