Off topic, but to me personal, what has become an even bigger annoyance is floods of newbies (< 10 reputation points) that ask a question and never come back to tick off the correct answer. Some of them even write a comment to thank the poster of a particular answer, but still they won't give them the credit they deserve. I wonder if that's because they're so new that they don't know they're supposed to mark the correct answer, of if they just don't care.
It happened to me once or twice, but I've seen the pattern in other threads, too. Of course SO should be a platform that welcomes beginners, but if that problem persists, I fear that competent people will hesitate investing the time and effort to answer questions for which they may never be rewarded.
Yeah, that's what it boils down to - but I have to say deep down I don't really like that idea.
Often times, the questions asked by people new to SO are legitimate questions, and not necessarily your typical "newbie question" à la How do I run a compiler? So I'm not talking about 101 or RTFM questions.
We all started out as newbies at some point, but also, just because someone hasn't got a lot of reputation points on SO doesn't necessarily mean that they're a newbie programmer.
I believe that SO should be a place where everyone can ask a question whether you're new to programming or an old-timer. If it's a thorough question it deserves a thorough answer. But then that answer deserves due credit, too - whether it's me or someone else answering.
There isn't necessarily any correlation between the newbie status of the questioner and the complexity (or lack thereof) of the question asked. This is particularly true of questions in niche sub-domains of programming such as image processing or scientific computing. In these niche areas, it is relatively common to see newbie Stack Overflow users asking PhD-level questions (often poorly worded in broken English).
The questions are typically not duplicates and the knowledge is valuable precisely because the expertise required to answer the question is rare, yet the reputation system does a poor job of rewarding the few experts who take the time to answer them for a couple of reasons: A) The questioner rarely bothers to give the answerer credit by marking the question as answered. B) The system does not allow a third party to mark the question as answered when the originator fails to do so. C) The people who answer these niche questions often only answer questions in their specific area of expertise -- they don't answer many of the more mundane programming questions that require little knowledge or effort to answer. Thus, despite the valuable expertise they've demonstrated, the reputation system fails to award these individuals with credit relative to the actual value of the information they dispense.
Why does SO place too much importance on the asker's opinion anyway?
If the asker thinks your answer is good, votes up and ticks as answer, you'll get 25 points. But it takes three non-asker users' vote-ups to top that.
The accepted answer tick should be just a flag and give no extra reputation points if the intention is really about providing quality content for everyone. But the current system encourages "just getting that tick".
I think part of this problem is that Stack Overflow will make users wait 2 minutes before voting an answer as correct, so they go the easiest route and leave a comment thanking the correct author instead.
I think users with enough reputation (>10k) should be able to accept answers on behalf of the asker. Maybe after a few days when it's clear that the OP has no intention of accepting or even coming back to the site.
I actually think that is a bad idea. The only time it would work properly is when the high rep user is an expert in that particular area, or when the well known "deemed correct" answer is actually the correct answer.
Not to be an iconoclast, but often the value of something like StackOverflow is that the "group-think" is wrong. You see this on support forums a lot, somebody with big rep comes in and answers and then that effectively ends debate even if the answer was unhelpful. Either the high rep user will get offended when the person tries to re-ask their question and start an "internet he-man contest" cough, or everyone else will just refer back to the big rep users answer, thus chilling their chance of getting the correct answer to 0.
how do you know those are newbies asking questions? A lot of Q&A content is either generated by code or outsourced content generated to capture long-tail SEO gaps.
It happened to me once or twice, but I've seen the pattern in other threads, too. Of course SO should be a platform that welcomes beginners, but if that problem persists, I fear that competent people will hesitate investing the time and effort to answer questions for which they may never be rewarded.