We will look into this. Not very different than voting rings on HN or other places. You want vote diversity.
I usually (always) search google for my problem de jour. And frequently (enough so I remember) the first stackoverflow result is my exact question... but closed. Probably happens once or twice a month, and usually on something "thorny" (i.e. no clear cut answer... so "primarily opinion based" answers are fine... I can compare the top voted answers and decide for myself).
More seriously though, Stack Exchanges platform isn't designed to handle opinion polls and endless discussions. You might want to consider asking the question on a site geared to opinions and discussions such as quora or reddit.
They crafted a particular question/answer and submitted and vote brigaded it everywhere. They were quite obvious and denied everything when confronted. After pointing out the obvious ring (same people pushing the same link with similar comments on all sites) they ganged up on me and sent me horrible private messages.
This pissed me off and I overreacted, exactly what they wanted... After cooling down, I went to their chat rooms to apologize for my angry replies language and removed comments on reddit. But they never, ever accepted they did any wrongdoing and pat themselves in the back. Oh, and never apologized for their harassment that triggered me in the first place.
This is why SO, reddit, HN are slowly getting long time users disenchanted. If you are not part of some virtual gang you are just meat, like a ghetto.
Can't speak for reddit but I think HN is quite much better than SO. Specifically it seems:
* somehow grasping the house rules seems to be easier for people here than on SO. This might be because HN attracts another audience though, I don't know for sure.
* maybe because redditism and stupidity is mostly downvoted swiftly?
* spam and politics is dealt with before it hits the front page
* but contrary to SO moderators the ones on HN don't seem to get a kick out of finding something, anything that can be banned with the correct reading of the guidelines
I sometimes see what I consider to be abuse of downvotes but 1.) it doesn't seem to be rings and 2.) downvote abuse is very often corrected by the rest of the members.
I used to come here several times a day, submit stories, try to add interesting comments to discussion (even playing devil's advocate). Now I mostly just skim the front page on slow days and get sad on how concentrated the opinions get.
Interesting. I usually find the mix that hits the front page about perfect.
A few times I have seen what I consider interesting topics being flagged of after an initial boost but I can live with that, I guess unlike me quite a few people are fed up after the nth discussion about open floor plans and I can live with that.
For at least some of these topics, Occam's Razor suggests it's the bias that's stinging you, not gamesmanship. What plausible gaming could be at work on behalf of Bill Gates?
For others, I have a really hard time believing that the gamesmanship has the directionality you think it does. NSA stories, for instance, have enormous support on HN. It is draining to express any skepticism on those stories at all. They also seem to be continually bolted to the top of the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8404207
There were many HN stories promoting that place for a good while. But when things go sour HN looks the other way.
Dropbox problem story first moved below the fold, then deleted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7568267
Those are just 2 examples. I'm not all day on the site, so I very likely miss most of these cases. This is just a tip of an iceberg.
Google and Facebook get a lot of flack here (and some support). Gates has his defenders and detractors (I heavily criticise his business practices, I'm modestly approving of his philanthropy), and there are numerous NSA stories.
What you likely don't see is how many stories total simply fall off the submissions page. I check it every so often -- perhaps several times a week, perhaps only every few weeks. But there's a lot of inflow and much of it sinks. That's typical of any curated site. An editor's job is to say "no". Hopefully their accuracy in doing this is better than random.
As sites grow in popularity, if the front page keeps the same capacity, any given submission's odds will fall. reddit's answer was subreddits -- there are now well over a half million: http://redditmetrics.com/history
HN's going to have to resolve this conflict somehow eventually.
When the house rules include not saying "Thank you" your going to see a race to the bottom in terms of human kindness.
> What you really need are more voters voting. Not sure how you get there, though.
I guess a whole lot of the people who could have helped you left long ago because of your fellow moderators. A reasonable first step would be by adjusting the attitude.
Maybe part of the problem is we just don't see all those "primarily opinion based" and "ugly discussions" questions that seems to be oh such a serious problem.
We definitely see a whole lot of the most useful questions closed, often for technicalities. It doesn't exactly encourage participation, does it?
HN somehow seems to be better at dealing with the problems without scaring good community members away. Of course HN has issues as well but so far the moderation team is doing a very good job of keeping politics and promotion away while leaving to the broader community to vote if something is interesting or not.
The problem with discussion boards is that it is absolutely painful to dig through a post until you stumble on a solution, and even then, you're in no way sure it's a good solution.
They need to harness that opinion/discussion/off-topic-subject energy in a way that doesn't work against their strategy. I think they are losing a lot of opportunity along the way.
I totally agree. This manifests itself in the worst way at http://programmers.stackexchange.com/. Or at least it did when I bothered with that site at all.
Or maybe, as I have already answered ircmaxell, Stack Overflow could raise the bar for asking questions ever so slightly from being the one thing you can do without rep?
If torrents of new users asking stupid questions are the biggest problem on the site this seems like a first obvious step.
I think that if you do what you propose, the site will just freeze in terms of user base.
It just would not be worth any new users time, especially given that when a user wants a question answered, it tends be slightly time sensitive.
One can easily overcome that with ten skillful edits, 2 upvotes (or 1 upvote and an accept) on an answer, or 4 upvotes on a question (20 rep is required for chat).
It's fairly easy for an individual to get into the chat, if they want.
That barrier does keep spammers from flooding the chat, though. And if you consider it an interview process, that's what the earning of reputation points accomplishes, and I'd argue it does so rather elegantly.
My issue is that SO is a dominating first-hit for lots of technical questions, and that by setting themselves into that position they kind of owe it to the community to make sure they don't have jerks (via voting rings or any such analogue) screwing up the quality of their results.
For example, I've searched for "what is the best x for y?" or "what are the tradeoffs for x vs y", and had even (a long time ago) contributed answers to similar questions in their game development exchange--however, they (or their users) have decided that there is no value whatsoever in fielding questions of that variety.