Stack Overflow was supposed to fix this kind of behavior by giving points to the accepted answer, but in practice people just spam out answers to questions they

Stack Overflow was supposed to fix this kind of behavior by giving points to the accepted answer, but in practice people just spam out answers to questions they didn't take the time to understand, in hopes that they'll get some points from other clueless people upvoting them. Anyway, the real solution here is to get better at speed reading the answers. Usually on any SO question there are lots of answers, and a few good ones, but the votes do not indicate which ones are good. You just have to quickly scan the entire list of answers and come to your own conclusions based on that information.