Is it OK for Stack Exchange to treat all questions / answers equally?

Question

Now aren't these some trivial questions:

• Java << Operator
• Java if statement is skipped
• Forced out of memory java.. inconsistent java behavior (I also get many points from these questions...)

And all the usual suspects (including myself) are here to write an answer, because they can easily get lots of upvotes and lots of score reaching the higher levels of "k" (40k, 50k, 200k) in reputation. But that's not what Stack Exchange aims to be, from what I understand: A big collection of trivial questions.

Because there are still many very good questions left unanswered, e.g. this one:

Transaction activity running total in SQL

...simply because they're not trivial. Which means:

1. You need more effort to write an answer
2. There are less people proficient enough to actually answer the question
3. Activity seems to have a positive feedback on itself on Stack Exchange. The more active a question, the "even more active" it becomes, because it ranks high in the "Top Questions" list. So the "good question" is even less interesting because of the "trivial ones" always being on top.
4. So ultimately: You get less upvotes, lower ROI

In capitalist economics, it would be silly to answer the good questions. So maybe (as it's done in politics), we could shift interests a bit towards the "good questions" or rather, away from the "trivial ones"? First there would be need to distinguish "good questions" from "trivial ones". Maybe using a separate upvote/downvote system available only after 5000 or 10000 reputation. Then maybe, the trivial questions could be adapted such that upvotes will only count 1/2.

Maybe also closing a question as duplicate is some sign that it might've been "trivial". But these are just some ideas.

In the end, this goes into the same direction as the Chess rating system. If a grandmaster beats a newbie, then he only gets little score (and the newbie loses little), because it was a trivial game. But if a newbie beats a grandmaster, the change of score is massive because that means the newbie might've had an excellent game. On Stack Exchange, this would translate to:

who's asking -> || newbie      | grandmaster    |
who's answering ||             |                |
      v         ||             |                |
================++=============+================+
newbie          || as today    | answer gets    |
                ||             | lots of points |
----------------++-------------+----------------+
grandmaster     || answer gets | as today       |
                || few points  |                |

I've also posted this table to this similar question: The bikeshed problem and Stack Exchange

Of course, if grandmaster/newbie were the criteria for "good" and "trivial" questions, then answering the "good question" (Transaction activity running total in SQL) still wouldn't give a "grandmaster" many points because it was asked by a "newbie".

Another idea:

There could be some sort of distribution of points across answerers. If 10 people can provide a good answer to a question, then the question was rather "trivial" and those 10 people will get less points for every upvote they get. Or the other way round, being "the only one" who knows is rewarded.

Answer 1

A part of the problem is, you get upvotes for good answers, But I only know if an answer is a good one when I understand it and know it is correct.
This is a lot easier for trivial questions than for good ones. So I think trivial answers gets sometimes a lot quick upvotes, because a lot of people see very quickly that this is the correct answer.

What about trying to identify the "good" and the "trival" questions on the amount of upvotes to the question?

E.g.

   Question  |  Answer points
    Votes    |   per upvote
  ----------------------------
     < -1    |        5
     -1,0,1  |       10
     >  1    |       15

Answer 2

Although the suggestion looks valuable at first sight, I actually think you are proposing to beat psychology.

There already is a good system for questions nominating trivial or good and that is the question vote count. And there already is a good system too for limiting the vote count on answers and that is the ability not to upvote.

So why are answers given by high rep users sometimes heavily upvoted? Maybe because:

• they were (one of) the first to answer and get the most readers,
• high rep users attract upvotes more, because the answers from low rep users are more carefully upvoted (the answer might be wrong or incomplete or is not well formed),
• badge hunters knowing nothing about the subject suspect the high rep user knows what he/she talks about and consider the answer valid anyway,
• all of the given answers to this question.

In all these cases, the upvoter simply often does not get what an upvote should mean: being useful. Though maybe "being useful" is worth a discussion on its own (, because the answer should be useful to whom?), an average nice answer on a trivial question with possibly a high number of duplicates simply is not that useful.

Maybe this should or could be more pointed out in the faq? (That an answer only deserves an upvote when it is useful). There is a help topic on how to ask questions, but there isn't one for how to vote.

Answer 3

We should be very careful when we are speaking about trivial, "indeed", "100% stupid", "obviously inconsistent" and so on, and so on questions.

Major part of information which is find of stackoverflow, actually, can be found using google, not matter is it about left shift operator in java or sorting algorithms regarding to cache prediction. Stackoverflow is like a supermarket for food. Yep, you can get it another way, but here we have something like extending services (if we are talking in capitalistic terms ))). It is pretty nice to have an ability to find apples and wine in one place, even if you are not drinking at all.

Besides, there are lot of questions, and quite useful I should say, that actually can be answered merely by reading the source code. Should we consider them trivial or not?

Besides, I believe each developer could confess, something, which seems to you to be a hard topic for now, just few months later can be trivial.

Those are very subtle issues. I don't believe we can found here something better than human votes. Event if we try to produce some empirical rules which supposed to help people make correct decisions and more likely penalize trivial questions.

Answer 4

This feels a bit like you are proposing a "technology" fix to what is essentially a "people" problem (To wit: folks who should know better keep answering duplicates).

Worse it would strip what little transparency remains in the SE voting system _{(I mean...acceptance is +15 (+2), up-votes are +5 on questions, +10 on answers while down-votes are -2 (-1) on answers and -2 (0) on questions unless the post is CW then votes have no effect on rep, also unless the rep cap has been reached (but the rep cap neglects acceptance and bounties), and there are some points for approved edits.... ARGHHHH!!!)}

Other solutions that I recall being suggested include

• Incentives for finding duplicates
• Not counting votes on questions that are closed and stay that way
• Aggressively deleting duplicates that don't add anything obvious
• Penalizing people who answer questions later closed as duplicates
• Trying to push a social norm to not answer these things again and again and again...

Obviously all of these suggests also have problems.

---

On a side note you seem to think that sky high reps are significantly founded on these kinds of simple answer, and I am not sure that is the case. Certainly they are helped by them, but that is not the same thing.