[am391]

Not meaning to sound snarky but it isn't this growth pattern reminiscent of a pyramid scheme ?

Obviously I'm not suggesting SO is a pyramid scheme, but if that's how the reputation system works surely it's an indication that it's broken fundamentally.

[sampo]

A lot of time when you need to check out some detail about the syntax or standard functions of some popular programming language, you won't start going through the TOC of the manual, you just google it. And usually the first hit is a SO answer. And quite often the answer is good. So why not click an upvote, even if the answer already had some hundreds of upvotes.

So the answers that keep turning up as first hits in google searches, keep gathering upvotes.

[dan1234]

Surely the simple solution there is to disable voting on answers once they reach a certain age?