I am angry

[timwi]

I am angry so I decided to vent a bit. (Please consider to refrain from commenting until you have read the last sentence, as otherwise you run the risk of making me angrier.)

The trouble is, I don’t really know why I’m angry. All I know is that it has something to do with StackOverflow and the fact that everyone there is stupid beyond description

Comments

[archai]

You're WRONG! I found this entry interesting! HA! :P

This is why I despise looking for answers on Google these days. I've even tried to look for HOWTOs and comprehensive docs on things that I have found before and failed to bookmark, and was unable to find them because those real results were flooded out by shitty forum posts and answers services that provided insufficient or incorrect details and cited nothing, manned by people providing answers either for the prestige or on the basis of "well, this worked for [me|my brother|my friend|my cousin|etc.] in a similar but not identical situation..."

I think if you want useful answers, the best solution is still the good old fashioned mailing list. I've been flooded out by Linux forum morons parroting answers many times (try finding a good explanation of the HAL framework), but half or more of the mailing list archive results I find are actually useful, and community reputation in those environments depends on the same thing as it does in real life - knowing your stuff, reliably, over much time and many answers. Granted, list traffic can be a bear, but I think the high barrier to entry there is actually a boon; people don't subscribe to a list casually.

Also, downvote religiously. I'm willing to bet you do this already, but downvote religiously if an answer is wrong, even if only because it's The Right Thing to Do. It would be better if people had to be moderators or some sort of uprated member to vote at all, but barring that...

It's aggravating that people have found ways to so badly exploit pageranks, though. Forums should be categorically excluded form Google. Forums have their own search mechanisms already; I don't need to see that stuff when I'm trying to search the Real Internet.

[timwi]

Funny you should mention this downvote thing. In this question I was criticised for having cast too many downvotes and too few upvotes in proportion; but when I asked on meta whether I should be worried about this, I was told to “downvote away”...

[archai]

Interesting that a couple of the replies in the second thread mentioned that the poster didn't downvote because it had repercussions from people who got butthurt over having been downvoted. I cannot imagine why they would care; are they there to ask questions and help others, or are they there to get a higher reputation score? If severely technical questions that have nice clear-cut divisions between helpful and unhelpful are the order of the day there, they should up- or downvote as needed and let the chips fall where they may. If they're honestly voting on merit, and people can't take it, then it's time to find a new forum for their hard questions - possibly one where people know how to stand behind their actions, like adults.

[timwi]

Well yeah, but 99.99% of the people are in it for the reputation score, so they will naturally converge to a behaviour that fosters it. This means, for example, that if I downvote all the answers on a question except for my own, my answer will get retaliation downvotes, irrespective of the content of my answer. Thus I am discouraged from downvoting others on a question that I’ve answered. It’s despicable behaviour, but what can you do about it?