I think lostjimmy is objecting to the mindless upvoting of bad nodes. Your "offtopic arguments between knowledgeable Perl people" are potentially very good nodes, very worth reading; they will almost certainly contain interesting and original thoughts. They are light-years away from the kind of things we see in the examples lostjimmy linked: responses that not only don't answer the question, but often consist entirely of paraphrases of basic documentation, or -- worse still -- purely mechanical copy-and-paste jobs.

It's hard to believe that all the people who upvoted those are saying that they felt them to be worth reading. It seems much more likely that the voters haven't read the responses any more carefully than the responders read the original question: it just seems to be a case of "node is something about foo, response also mentions foo, automatic ++".

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