Comment SO scoring is not comparable across questions (Score 1) 352
Can't post a comment on his blog. Post and preview just reload the page. Cookies are on for blogspot and I've a google.com account. No other way to contact Peter. I presume blogspot requires cookies enabled for some additional domain, but there's no way to find out. I'm gobsmacked as ever that a major web-site either doesn't know or doesn't care this occurs - both causes are stupifying.
My would-be comment;
I believe this analysis is fundamentally incorrect, due to the StackOverflow scores having a different meaning than that required for this analysis to be valid.
Difficult questions and answers, which require a great deal of specialist knowledge, receive very few votes, since almost no developers are qualified to hold an opinion.
I've answered questions on lock-free data structures which have in the end obtained one or two votes - because hardly anyone has spent the years required becoming competent in this field.
I've provided one sentence of grandma-wisdom about someone's problem at work with their boss asking them to use pirated software and I think I received 40 votes - 400 points.
Quick and simple answers to simple questions receive the highest number of votes.
I think the scoring system actually reflects the most popular answer for a single given question; that the scoring system is only meaningful *within the answers for a single question*. It selects and rates between them.
As such, this higher-level analysis, comparing scores *across questions*, is fundamentally incorrect. It requires scores to be a type of indicator which they are not.
To summarize; if answers requiring years of learning lock-free gains very few votes, but one-liners telling someone they'll have more problems in future get very many votes, the actual number of votes an answer receives does not indicate the skill or experience of the person posting the answer. It only reflects the rating of answers *for that one question*. If you wish to compare answers on a per person basis across questions, I think all you can do is consider the position of the answer within all the answers for that question, and assign a value to that position.
If this were done, my lock-free answer, which was top of the list of a very short list, would receive the top score, which my one-liner, which was I think second or third of the answers to that question, would receive a lower score.