Sure, there's correlation but the correlation always breaks down whenever anyone needs it most.
If you ask an easy question you could have just googled or read the man pages to get a decent answer is what's upvoted. But few people really need help answering those questions.
If you ask a hard question potentially involving nuances and situational constraints or if you ask a very specific question requiring expertise you will get the same naive surface level answers highly up-voted and the one guy who actually knows your question has his answer downvoted to oblivion by the people who know just enough to be dangerous.
If you aren't familiar with the subject matter in question it's even worse because a guy who knows what he's talking about answering your hard question and getting downvoted for it is indistinguishable from a guy who has no idea what he's talking about giving a wrong answer to an easy question.
Of course the end result is that everyone who knows WTF they're talking about contributes minimally if at all.
Stack Overflow is better than most subreddits because you can link a man page or doc but the more a subject requires subjective judgement the more it displays the pattern I described above.
This has the effect, however, of making it clear that the forum itself is mostly racist, rather than masquerading as not being that.
> but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
> the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
The obvious answer to this however is not to remove the very useful upvote button everywhere but to
- stop frequenting racist forums,
- if they are actually racist, tell law enforcement (where applicable)
isn't it?
For example: https://www.report-it.org.uk/reporting_internet_hate_crime
Consider both:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_laws_of_the_United_Sta...
but it's also definitely beneficial in places like Stack Overflow, where there's a logical reason to assume that the most popular answer might have any correlation at all with the best answer.
the best answer will always be at or near the top in a place like Stack Overflow. so the upvote mechanism is useful there. but the most racist answer will always be at or near the top in a forum where racist people just share opinions.
and this malicious example is just chosen for clarity. even in a more innocuous context, if there is no absolute correct answer and nobody is testing the answers for accuracy, upvotes often do more harm than good, and upvote sites are almost by definition groupthink factories, when they don't pertain to verifiable claims that are quickly tested (which is what makes upvotes helpful on a site like Stack Overflow).