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Comment by corwinstephen | Hacker News Reader

I think at least part of this phenomenon can be attributed to what I call the StackOverflow effect, that being point-based incentives. People on SO answer questions much of the time because they believe their answer will earn them karma (or whatever it's called on SO). In fact, I'd be lying if I said Hacker News karma didn't have at least a little influence on my decision to actually take the time to write this comment.

Because of the StackOverflow Effect, people will choose to answer even the worst questions as if they're fair play, simply because they have an answer they believe will earn them a couple points. If points were not involved, I'm willing to bet a lot more people would get told off for their poor quality questions, and a lot less people would continue to post them.

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I'm not even sure the gamification or point/karma scoring of the question and answer space is responsible. The same behavior was evident in comp.lang.perl.misc back in the late 90s. People would ask "bad questions", and people with barely more experience/knowledge than the questioner would happily provide answers/solutions. I'm guessing this is at least partly showing off "Hey look! I worked out how to do that last week!" And often they'd provide lousy or even dangerous advice, and the "old hands" would be left to try and explain why (for example) copy n pasting from Matt's Script Archive was such a bad idea.

There's probably an endless supply of new-but-inexperienced coders who're happy to show off their new-found skills by offering advice to the even less experienced. I'm less sure there's an endless supply of "old hands" to keep an eye on them.

And I've seen this in areas other than programming too. It's _really_ common for motorcyclists with a year or two of riding experience to be offering all sort of advice to newer riders - advice which riders with 10 or more years of experience will sometimes just roll their eyes at, and sometimes will step in and say "that's not just wrong, but dangerous enough to get you killed if you're not careful".

(and yeah, I've been on both the "barely experience" and "decades of war stories" side of the advice giving in both coding and motorcycling…)

Tell me more, I'm curious about this :)

kinda true, but on the other hand there are enough people on SO that will comment on the question instead of answering it, and the comment will be "what have you tried?" Sometimes I even see comments that really try to puch the OP to start thinking. Although I'm really in doubt if that helps, you cannot expect to change someones mindset with some comments.

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