Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

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Re: "But to complain about a system where there are too many people answering questions is, to be perfectly blunt, ridiculous and narcissistic"

I've never tried to participate in Stack Overflow as a hyper-active question answerer, but as a sometimes-user of the site who ends up there via Google often when performing coding question searches, the site still suffers from what has been dubbed "The Fastest Gun in the West" problem. I can usually find answers that are at least a useful starting point to solving my core problem on Stack Overflow but they are very often not the top ranked answer and are often way at the bottom sitting with a 0 rating due to having been posted "long" after the question went live (and by "long" after I usually mean like the next day). The top rated stuff is often superficial junk answers that just happened to be the best available when the question was still a hot one.

So I'd argue that even from a non-poster's view, the site is broken (because I have to dig through it more than I should have to) though still ultimately useful.

This happens sometimes, but I don't think it's endemic. I've seen people come in a day late, even in questions where an answer has been accepted, and get tons of votes. It just has to be obviously much better than the others and you have to hope the stars don't align against you (as with so many things in life). The "fastest gun" problem typically occurs when the best answer does not really stand out to people.

For example, glancing at my top five answers, one of them was posted the day after the others in the question and got four times as many votes as the next top answer. I remember that at the time I wrote my answer, a very low-quality answer from somebody who didn't know Ruby very well was accepted, but now mine is accepted and the other guy graciously deleted his.

And that one's still getting votes. People come across those old questions and vote the good answers up years later. So the site can correct itself as long as people are willing to do that.

Unless something has changed, you need a minimum level of reputation to upvote. If you are not a member of the site (I have a vague memory of starting with only 10 rep - I have no idea now) you have no mechanism to actually do as you suggest until after you've posted or asked a question that has gotten at least one vote.

I just created an account there after years of lurking and absorbing knowledge from other's questions and answers, but I only have 1 rep.

Oddly enough, I created the account specifically to upvote the answer that solved my problem of which another member had asked about, but I am unable to do so until I submit a problem of my own that has not already been answered.

Yeah, that's still true — people who haven't participated in the site cannot upvote. I'm not sure if there was a larger point that I'm missing. Things still get upvoted quite a bit even with the rep requirement (and you could make a reasonable argument that the rep requirement means the votes you get are marginally better indicators of quality).

I presume that when you find questions in this state you're upvoting the "good but slow" answers? The original asker may have accepted the fast answer and moved on, but if you're landing on the question now, it's definitely not too late to improve the content you found.

I regularly upvote older questions and answers that I find interesting or helpful. It's also fun to have my own old answers upvoted or commented on, which prompts me to go back and reread them.

Do you take the trouble to upvote those answers that are helpful to you? I think that, given some time, the best answers of all questions will slowly bubble up, but that only happens if folks like you and me upvote the answers that are actually good

Generally, no, I don't upvote the answers, because I have no idea what open id provider I used to make my old stack overflow account, which brings me to the other broken thing about Stack Overflow... Open ID. Nice in theory, hellish in practice.

You need rep to upvote and downvote.

Yes, 15 to upvote, 125 to downvote. Asking a few serious questions is bound to earn you the three upvotes (you get rep for your questions being upvoted) required to be able to upvote. Honestly, I don't understand the fuss. You really only need to use the site as a consumer to gain enough rep to participate.

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