We found a fairly highly ranked "ticked" answer to a question yesterday (it was on keeping the heading rows of tables visible during scrolling) and immediately thought: (1) this answer seems stupid, (2) we can think of better solutions. Within thirty minutes we had two superior proof-of-concepts working and had found a decent off-the-shelf solution.
What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.
1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.
2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.
3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.
4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)
re #2, that's not entirely true. There have been a good amount of times that another answer gets upvoted way higher than the accepted (ie. "ticked") answer because it's better. In those cases, even the original asker has chosen one, the community has chosen another ... so it's often worth scrolling to see the other answers that have been given.
That being said, I agree with everything else you've said :)
What Stack Overflow is great at is SEO (not sure if this is organic or deliberate or both). This at least tends to pull interested eyeballs in a kind-of similar direction. What happens then is anyone's guess.
1) Highly ranked answers are often horribly wrong. People asking common questions are, presumably, often being pulled to these answers and treating them as gospel.
2) Once an answer gets "ticked" (even when hopelessly wrong) there's very little that can happen to fix it.
3) Stack Overflow is (actively or passively) good at appearing in Google search results, but not at converging like threads; which thread appears in a search is far from stable, so two similar searches can take you to completely different threads.
4) The depth and quality of threads seems highly language-correlated. E.g. the PHP threads I've seen seem to mainly consist of someone posting bad code they've written and having it debugged by someone else. Javascript discussions are of a much higher quality. Obj-C discussions are another level or two beyond that. (Which says something... perhaps about the awfulness of PHP's error messages.)