[DC-3]

This is actually a great idea.

I've noticed a trend recently in a subreddit I frequent that obviously wrong statements are suddenly getting upvoted. I'm not talking about things that conflict with my opinions - I'm talking about statements that are demonstrably and objectively incorrect.

I think the issue is a critical mass of people very new to the topic at hand who upvote things that sound reasonable without having the knowledge to be able to engage with the statements even slightly critically. This forms a feedback loop as upvoted comments are assumed to be reasonable. It means you can say something blatantly wrong, but stated in a manner such that it assumes the form of a sensible insight, and be upvoted for it.

Something like the system you propose would do well to promote genuine insight above platitudes, and platitudes above superficially plausible misinformation.

[tialaramex]

I don't see this happen often in areas where I'm an expert but I do see it, and it's weird.

There's a post somewhere, maybe one of the Stack Overflow sites or Reddit where somebody asks about how SSH works, and the answer given and upvoted is horribly wrong, it's like how somebody who half-understood an explanation of PGP might think SSH could work.

So I down-voted that and I wrote an explanation based on my understanding but referring to the RFC as I went, and, whenever I was surprised by the RFC, also checking the OpenSSH source code (the RFC is correct, but, you know, always worth checking).

It got downvoted. Zero comments. So clearly people are looking at these two explanations that are quite different and they are down-voting the one they... don't like?