This leaves me wondering how you might a site like SO that incentivizes participation and quality answers, but disincentivizes poaching and incomplete first answers.
Could you build an incentive strategy and reputation system around collaborative answers?
One option is to either not show scores for some time after answers are posted (at least to other viewers - maybe the asker could still see answer scores?), and/or to randomize the order in which answers are shown for some period of time. That would at least make it less likely that people read just the first answer, up-vote it, and move on. Each person would see a different "first" answer, at least for some time period. Maybe after an hour or 24 hours, then they become ranked by votes? Just a thought - I haven't actually tried it.
What if incomplete first answers could be "merged" with better, more complete, answers, with the better answer getting the karma from the incomplete one?
vitd|10 years ago
stcredzero|10 years ago