Why do people with high reputation get upvoted even for worthless answers? [duplicate]

Question

Please forgive me if I am making some very big mistake by asking a silly question like this. By no means do I want to disrespect any of the intellectual people here on Stack Overflow.

I read a few question and answers on Stack Overflow and found that people with very high reputation get upvotes very easily even if the answers are not worthy to get so many of the upvotes.

An example of such a post is this question:- Can we execute a .bat file in post build event command line in visual studio?

I know that the obvious answer could be "yes" but that's just an example.

In this I found that people have given upvotes and also the answer was accepted, just because it's Jon Skeet, the most reputed and most intelligent guy of the world, who has answered.

If some other guy who had less reputation had answered this in a similar manner, then we can very easily see that people would have downvoted and voted to delete the answer. Or the community or other moderators would have deleted the answer.

Why is this sort of behavior present?

P.S. Jon Skeet: Sir please don't get me wrong. I respect you the most on this planet and by no means do I doubt your intelligence. I took you just because all of us respect and appreciate you, and maybe many can understand what I am trying to convey easily. And if by any means I am disrespecting you then please forgive me. But trust me that's not intentional or personal.

EDIT:-

To mark another example as pointed by someone in comments:-

Issues with ANDs and ORs (COBOL)

So how come this answer deserves 117 reps ;) Just becasue the person who is answering it has high reputation.

Trust me there are many more which you people can find as your reputations are higher and I have few restrictions because of less rep. But that's how I have seen it.

Answer 1

First off, that's a terrible question. Both the title and the body simply read:

Can we execute a .bat file in post build event command line in visual studio?

I'd argue that the question didn't deserve much more of an answer. It did get several good answers though, and two of them are upvoted much more highly than Jon's. I'd say that and the 5 downvotes on Jon's answer quash any arguments of favoritism.

---

I want to address the following comments you made above.

I just wanted to know that is it that Community or moderators dont delete those answers which are answered by people with high reputation or is there any other reason.

The community and moderators do delete answers from people with high reputation. Jon (for one example) has an entire page of deleted answers, but he mostly seems to have the good sense to delete them himself when they aren't of the best quality. I myself (for one other example) have hundreds of deleted answers, many of which were deleted by other moderators.

Because I have many times that Community deletes those answers which have been accpted also but are of low quality.

I'm pretty sure the community can't delete accepted answers It's very difficult for the community to delete accepted answers unless they are negatively voted, which is why I rarely do so myself. Also note that author's can't delete their own accepted answers, which might be another reason they tend to stick around even if they're not the best quality.

Answer 2

That answer wasn't the best Jon has ever done - we all have answers that we're not particularly proud of.

Jon didn't have a huge reputation score back then. It might have been huge comparatively speaking at the time, but nothing like it is today. So you shouldn't correlate the voting on an ancient answer with his current rep total. Those votes look more like "we agree with you" rather than "that was a great answer". (Note that it is an answer, so don't flag it for converting to a comment). Regardless of whether it is the marked answer, if you believe it to be low in quality you have two options:

• down vote it
• edit it and make it better

(it's not often you will EVER get a legitimate chance to edit one of Jon's posts).

You should also note that StackOverflow has become considerably less forgiving of answers like that - these days it would get voted down, someone would leave a comment, people would have a go at flagging it.

Answer 3

This specific example, you are running into 2 issues, neither of which is tied to who answered the question.

1. In SO time, the post is ancient history. Things were much different in 2009 than they are now. Such an answer now would have been better as a comment and likely would have been flagged as NAN if it was posted today. Heck, maybe even Jon wanted to delete the answer since it is just a comment but since it is accepted, he can't.
2. The answer correctly answers the question. So when such an answer correctly addresses the question, the problem is the question, not the answer.

Both of those combined explain the upvotes. And frankly, I think more than a few of the downvotes could be due to who answered the question too because they could be saying "Jon, how could you post such a poor answer".

Now in general, you should treat any answer like this just as you would any other poor quality answer... though downvotes and comments.

Answer 4

I have seen this too - answers by high rep users get upvotes, when I think the same answer by a low rep user would have been ignored or downvoted.

I guess when we see an answer by a high-rep user, and we find it unclear or lacking, we are more likely to assume that it's because we don't understand it. And therefore less likely to downvote, flag or comment.

It could also be that a high reputation score and lots of badges contribute to a halo effect, making us inclined to respond positively to posts by that user. We should be judging posts by the value of the post only, of course, but we're only human.

The sad consequence is that low-rep users may be held to a higher standard than high-rep users, even if we should all be held to the same standard.

The best thing to do is to be as objective as you can on Stack Overflow. If you think an answer is wrongly upvoted, don't get worked up about it - downvote and/or comment. If that doesn't help, move on. There are more important things in life than internet points.