Comment by mninm
4 years ago
What I realized years ago is that the upvote on Stack Overflow don't mean "I tried this and it works for me" or "I'm an expert and this is the answer". No, the upvotes on Stack Overflow are along the line of the upvotes/likes one would find on Reddit or HN. More like "you sound confident" or "I was looking for this but I haven't tried it yet"
> No, the upvotes on Stack Overflow are along the line of the upvotes/likes one would find on Reddit or HN. More like "you sound confident"
I think you're right that online scoring systems tend to incentivise false confidence. This happens with blog posts too, where a student of some topic writes a confident and subtly incorrect blog post, and it then ends up on the HN front-page. Only someone with a relatively deep knowledge of the topic can then call out the errors. Ideally it should always be made clear upfront that the author is new to the material.
Somewhat related: Stack Overflow's unfortunate norm of calling out mistakes in answers in a way that goes beyond confidence and strays into condescension and borderline hostility. For a lot of people it seems it's not enough to be seen to be right, they also feel the need to paint someone else as clueless, while just about passing as acceptably polite by keeping the aggression passive. If challenged, they'll brush it off as 'directness'.
Also to create a democracy.
> Our sites are all intended to be a sort of representative democracy. Moderator elections are an important part of that plan, but voting on questions and answers is the primary mechanism through which the community governs the site on a day to day basis.
https://stackoverflow.com/help/why-vote
And it can fall to all the errors and issues of democracy too - especially the “pseudo-expert” one. At least you can leave a comment on the answer if there’s an issue.
experts can edit the stackoverflow answers (assuming their stackoverflow rating is high enough)
The number of times I've seen the only correct answer being a terse explanation with a short code snippet and having zero upvotes astounds me.
They may not have been the attention seekers like other posters. But they provided exactly what was asked for. And when I come across their post years later I upvote.
> More like "you sound confident"
Meh, I'm usually there looking for how to do something, and if a response helps me do whatever I was looking to acomplish, or at least on the right track, it was helpful and worth an upvote. I've never upvoted just because someone sounded confident.... at least not on SO.
There's also the possibility that the answer was correct when written. Especially with web stuff a year old answer could be completely wrong now.
It's a user experience issue and it's hard to solve. You can't possibly expect people to come back to one of their SO tabs AFTER they get code to work.
Why not? I dont upvote an answer unless it works...
I think it was sarcasm... just missing the /s