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Discussion on: Has Stack Overflow Become An Antipattern?

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jhilgeman profile image
Jonathan H

Okay but it's still not a wiki, no matter how much anyone wants it to be. SO and all the other StackEXCHANGE sites are presented as forums. Even the terminology (question and answers) reflects a Q&A forum, not a wiki. If you think about it, ALL of the knowledge that has been gathered so far is an answer in response to a question.

So saying, "I want this to be a wiki," while retaining all of the indications that it isn't... is it any wonder why people get frustrated?

To top it all off, the voting mechanism is blindly seen by a small handful as some quality control device but it's implemented in a way that encourages inertial voting rather than quality control.

If an answer is downvoted once, it has a very good chance of getting more downvotes. Similarly, answers with several upvotes will get a lot more of them just by virtue of being the top answer, even if it's a bad answer. One downvote by someone knowledgeable will quickly be overshadowed by four upvotes from people who just copy-and-pasted the top answer blindly and thought it worked.

So even though some people have big dreams about how they want the site to work, it's ignorant of how it truly IS working.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

If an answer is downvoted once, it has a very good chance of getting more downvotes. Similarly, answers with several upvotes will get a lot more of them just by virtue of being the top answer, even if it's a bad answer.

Indeed, I too have seen this. Mob mentality at its worst.