3 ms·
Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either. In the earlier days, it was designed to st
by lambda 8y ago
Except part of the problem is that it's not even doing a very good job of giving a good authoritative answer either.
In the earlier days, it was designed to straddle the line more with a wiki; there were "community wiki" questions and answers, but people couldn't get reputation for those, and if someone's question or answer was edited enough it would automatically converted to "community wiki". However, people would get upset about losing the potential karma, so that feature was taken away, and major edits to other people's answers that change the meaning of it started to be discouraged.
However, there's no way for anyone other the person who originally asked a question to change which answer is accepted. So if someone asked a question 10 years ago, and someone gave a bad answer or an answer that is now out of date but which was accepted, and those two people have now left the site, there's no good way to get the first answer to the question to be the correct one. You can write a better answer, and even if it's upvoted, there will still be the accepted answer ahead of it.
I've tried following the original, more wiki-like spirit of the site by editing such answers, and then gotten other people reverting me because the edit would "give reputation to someone who didn't deserve it."
I feel like the incentives, and balance, and community of the site are just off right now. It still serves a useful purpose, but it could be a lot better, but whenever I've tried making suggestions for how to improve, I've gotten so much pushback that I've just given up.