[TheOtherHobbes]

If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

In fact the answers on SO have a very mediocre SNR. There are some bullseyes, but just as often answers are some combination of misleadingly devoted to an edge case instead of the core problem, nitpicky for the sake of appearances while contributing no real value, out of date, or just plain wrong.

Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

[the_af]

> If you're answering questions voluntarily and getting nothing out of it, you can always stop.

If most people stop, the community ceases to exist. Such is the real danger with Help Vampires.

To be clear, I'm not talking about myself. I don't have the time to answer questions on SO (though I answered some, years ago) and admire the people who do. I'm also not a moderator there, because who has the time?

> Help vampires are the least of SO's problems.

Only because the policies enforced to stop them were mostly successful. When you solve the most pressing problem, the next problem in the line becomes the most pressing one :)

> It would be far more useful to have some kind of editorial system devoted to refining answers down to their most useful canonical up to date core rather than just accreting them.

There is such a thing in SO. As you can imagine, some users complain about it and are unhappy with this solution. Some people are so unhappy that they proposed forking SO to create some other community with different editorial/moderation standards. Care to guess how successful they were?