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Comment by whiterook6 | Hacker News Reader

Here's my brilliant idea: the longer it takes for an answer to be marked correct, or the more answers there are before one is marked correct, the more points that answer deserves.

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The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if you could retroactively years later re-award it to a newer answer. Since the gamification angle was so prominent, that might rob the decade-old author of their points for their then-correctness, so idk if they even allowed it.

I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.

My feeling is that many times the moderators are not competent to decide correctly.

They could go with "when in doubt, keep the duplicate", but they chose the opposite. Meaning that instead of happy users and duplicates, they have no duplicates, and no more users.

How about if people with a higher reputation contribute an exponentially higher score when voting? Like, someone with ten top-rated answers has a 1,000-point vote (more nuanced than that, obviously).

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