Can we do better at reducing bike-shedding?

Question

"Bike-shedding" is a phenomenon where there is excessive discussion of a topic because it seems easy, so everyone feels that they are competent to discuss it. We seem to have a couple of recent examples:

1. How do I experimentally measure the surface area of a rock?

2. Are we really moving at the speed of light in the time dimension?

In example 1, there is a good, reasonable question (I upvoted), and a couple of highly upvoted answers that state opposite points of view -- followed by another 20 answers.

In example 2, a question is asked that duplicates a previous question. There are currently 2 close votes, 6 answers, and 22 upvotes for an answer that IMO is very poor and would have been ignored if posted now as an answer to the original question. Buried among these answers to the duplicate question, but with only a few upvotes, is a nice answer from an expert in the field (author of a popularization on the subject) which contradicts the 22-times-upvoted answer and which would have been a nice answer to the original question.

Is there anything we can do to reduce this kind of thing? It's a very negative thing for people visiting the site if they have to sort through all of this to try to find a reliable answer.

The only thing that occurs to me right now as a solution would be that possibly activity on duplicate questions could be kept from spinning out of control if votes to close were somehow more prominently displayed -- but this would I guess require a change to the SE software.

We also have the mechanism where people with a lot of rep can single-handedly close a question as a duplicate. But this is not used much, both because people with this power exercise self-restraint and because it's highly tag-specific (e.g., I have the power for general-relativity, but not for special-relativity).

Answer 1

I don't think there is much you can do beyond what you have discussed and what is already in place. You just have to trust the users looking at the question to be responsible to look for duplicates first (this one is hard to trust at times), give good answers, vote appropriately, and go through the close vote queues to agree on duplicate votes already cast. People are flawed, so this is not always ideal (as you have shown), but it is what we have.

Something that you did not mention that helps with HNQs garnering many answers is protecting questions (which has been done for the surface area question). This does not prevent many or bad answers from being posted still, but I think it helps.

Additionally, if you have found better answers to questions that are duplicates you could explicitly mention these in a comment on the new question. That at least brings further attention to them.

Answer 2

I think the situation you mention is best described by the idiom "If you can't beat it, lead it". People who would be able to find a duplicate, or downvote a poor answer, are confronted with a crowd of new users coming from the HNQ link, who typically have 101 rep and for this reason cannot downvote or VTC, even if they agree. All they can do is upvote.

This kind of voting asymmetry leads to the only possible behaviour that has a visible impact and is rewarded with reputation - write your own answer, no matter how poor or controversial it is. Personally I came to the conclusion that unless this voting asymmetry is somehow fixed (by either forbidding 101 rep users to vote at all, or letting them downvote), any other measure will be akin to symptomatic treatment at best.

To clarify: I didn't mean that "If you can't beat it, lead it" should be everyone's modus operandi. I'm saying that someone who takes time and effort to search for duplicates and downvote bad answers is penalized with rep loss and resentful comments, whereas someone who adds yet another answer to the lot (good or otherwise) is rewarded. Bad answers won't go anywhere until that changes.