This is why multiple answers complete for up votes on Stack Overflow; there are usually a few good ones, and they will all have a reasonable level of community peer review upvotes to reflect that. These answers compete, just like your science will compete to be published in a well known scientific journal, and will be compared to other science also published in other reputable journals. Competition makes sense in a world where things can be, at least to some degree, objectively verified.
Whereas competition around the topic “who is the coolest X-Man character” makes… significantly less sense. Because obviously it is Wolverine. Duh!
You seem to be implying it is some kind of bar room brawl with “only” a mere mandate for civility… have you ever spent any time on the sites in question? If you had, I don’t know how you could hold that opinion. Civility was enforced, with an iron fist, from day zero.
Because every programmer knows the best way to motivate a programmer to solve a hard problem is to tell them another programmer did it better than them?
Which I believe is true of most, if not all, technical fields.
