I think you're right that online scoring systems tend to incentivise false confidence. This happens with blog posts too, where a student of some topic writes a confident and subtly incorrect blog post, and it then ends up on the HN front-page. Only someone with a relatively deep knowledge of the topic can then call out the errors. Ideally it should always be made clear upfront that the author is new to the material.
Somewhat related: Stack Overflow's unfortunate norm of calling out mistakes in answers in a way that goes beyond confidence and strays into condescension and borderline hostility. For a lot of people it seems it's not enough to be seen to be right, they also feel the need to paint someone else as clueless, while just about passing as acceptably polite by keeping the aggression passive. If challenged, they'll brush it off as 'directness'.
> Our sites are all intended to be a sort of representative democracy. Moderator elections are an important part of that plan, but voting on questions and answers is the primary mechanism through which the community governs the site on a day to day basis.
They may not have been the attention seekers like other posters. But they provided exactly what was asked for. And when I come across their post years later I upvote.
Meh, I'm usually there looking for how to do something, and if a response helps me do whatever I was looking to acomplish, or at least on the right track, it was helpful and worth an upvote. I've never upvoted just because someone sounded confident.... at least not on SO.
It's a pretty neat rule to have in mind.
I didn't really grok Test Driven Development until I worked thru the book, line-by-line, experiencing the workflow.
Knowledge vs experience.
And also first, or at least early, and subject to a reinforcing cycle of 'sufficiently good' or 'fixed it enough' that it achieves stratospherically more votes than an 'even more good' or 'fixes it properly' answer that came in too late for the same traction.
So exactly the solution most project managers are after? /s
I don’t find it ironic, I find it quite normal that even small snippets of code contains bugs (given the daily review requests I receive).
I think when copying code literally from StackOverflow what’s more important is understanding what the code does, and why , rather than copying it ad-verbatim by copy & pasting it into your production code.
I also often find on StackExchange et al that quite often the most upvoted is the one that ‘fixes it’ for ‘most people’ yet the correct answer is down at number 3 or 4. Again, understanding the answer and why it applies, helps give you the context to understand if this is actually the solution to your problem or just treats the symptom.