Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zamalek 3999 days ago
> I've found it to be excellent, and I always get my questions answered perfectly.

That's debatable. I used to be a fairly regular contributor. Fairly often I'd get beaten to the answer by the guy "who types in the minimal amount to be correct." The asker would then immediately tick the answer instead of waiting for my answer which has a great deal more information (important caveats, alternative approaches, pros/cons). Incomplete information is a smaller concern, though.

The greater concern is the knowledgeable person who "who types in the minimal amount to be correct, leaving out crucial information resulting in actually incorrect information." The type of information you can easily discredit with a simple CLI application, or the type of information that blows up in the fact of 100 requests/sec. It has a green tick mark next to it.

That green tick mark is never going away - the asker has long since left the website. The answerer is never coming back because he has his karma points and will ignore any and all comments you make pleading for him to correct it (remember: you can't make meaning-altering edits to answers.

That's the crux of it. S/O has some great insightful information but also has some downright dangerous garbage, dangerous amounts of which has a green tick next to it. The gamification fixed the human troll-like tendencies (for a while) but brought out another dangerous trait: the ability to do almost anything (lie, half truths, rush jobs) in order to get imaginary internet points.

2 comments

Actually I agree with you - good point - I can see why being on the other end (i.e. as the answerer) can be really frustrating, especially as you said, your answer can be 'more' correct with greater detail etc.

As I said, my experience could very well be based on that I've only asked something like 5 questions on there, all very specific, which is really the kind of question perfectly suited for a site like that.

There are badges for answers that score highly but which do not get accepted.
Which is fine were I to care less about correctness: rewarding the person who answered correctly does nothing about the green tick on the incorrect or incomplete answer. The gamification was a device to improve the quality of the content on the website, which worked really well until human nature found the path of least resistance.

The badge is an acknowledgement of a problem/bug in the design of the game, not a fix.

If it's any consolation, as a regular reader, I rarely look for the answer with the green checkmark. I read through the top X answers until I find one that answers the question in terms I can understand. Perhaps a better fix is to mark the question as Answered, rather than mark a Specific Answer.