To me, the #1 problem with Stack Overflow is the number of plain bad answers that are given and often accepted. CSS question? Here’s someone’s un-researched and

To me, the #1 problem with Stack Overflow is the number of plain bad answers that are given and often accepted. CSS question? Here’s someone’s un-researched and invalid first guess, that doen’t work in practice. +10 karma and accepted. Hard question? Here’s some loser’s gut feeling of “can’t be done” in exchange for +2 karma, and then a knowledgeable follow-up a day later from someone who has actually been there, done that, and figured it out. Example: Someone with 82k karma posts a non-answer rudely telling me I should be using another technology altogether, a cheap and worthless move that earned +2 karma: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4696128/bash-script-determine-if-file-modified/4696145#4696145 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4696128/bash-script-deter... So often it’s apparent people are just throwing best-guess answers out there for karma, and this is hugely unhelpful. There should be a large penalty for stating incorrect guesses as fact. It’s to the point where I instantly mistrust any answer from someone with over 10k reputation as I learned there is a good chance they are just shooting from the hip for karma.