StackOverflow2013

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copied!<p>I find the voting system that Stack Overflow uses to be quite good. Other people essentially judge you as an expert or not. And the good answers bubble up to the top.</p> <p>I'd stray away from punishing people who don't get voted for, and maybe have some threshold for those who get consistently voted down, losing points.</p> <p>That said, with popular topics most people won't be bothered sorting through the flack to find the diamonds in the rough. So you are going to lose some good answers.</p> <p>Also Stack Overflow seems to punish people who post lost of unvoted answers... My score went down after posting this as I have a few posts with 0 votes.</p> <p><strong>[Update]</strong></p> <p>In response to comments: I think if you want more specific answers you have to dig deeper and look at a questions for a particular tag. I think the recent post <em><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon">What's your favorite “programmer” cartoon?</a></em> has shown that people will swamp more general and more "entertaining" questions with answers as they are more like procrastination. Answering more specific questions requires actual domain knowledge.</p> <p>As for why my score went down it may have been a bug. My score went from 91 to 81 when I posted this answer and then rose to 111 after that. As I'm not privy to the algorithm that Stack overflow uses, I assumed that that was what had happened.</p> <p>It might just have normalised my score.</p> <p><strong>[Update 2]</strong></p> <p>I think that social networks have to police themselves. They are owned and run by the community by their very nature. Just looking at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy" rel="nofollow noreferrer">AACS Revolt</a> that happened on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Digg</a> last year is proof enough that you can't control it.</p> <p>The trick is to have enough users who will mod down the garbage and mod up the good stuff.</p> <p>Perhaps hiring a number of moderators who can do this full time, or even just giving a few people who have proven themselves to be good citizens moderator rights, with extra weight on their moderation, most people online live for this kind of recognition and some might be willing to do it for free as they will have become members of some kind of social networking elite.</p> <p>The question is how do you stop them from abusing this power? As Stan Lee is fond of saying: With great power comes great responsibility.</p>

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