Q:

Do you smell setup in some highly upvoted questions/answers?

This is very hard to prove or even thinking of it may have consequences (let's see) but as any kind of democracy has its pitfalls, sometimes I feel a question (or maybe the answer too) has setup somehow to get huge upvotes.
I appreciate good questions and high level of knowledge and time which fulfilled the question but with that conspiracy theory in mind (with enough clues for myself) and just putting numbers in calculator, finding out how much time it takes to get such reputation in ordinary questions is disappointing.

Is there any pattern-recognition plan for eliminating such
situations?
What policies may eliminate such temptations?
Do you flag such question?

A:

While your refusal to give an example makes it impossible to be certain, I think you're talking about questions like:

Why is processing a sorted array faster than an unsorted array?
Why is subtracting these two times (in 1927) giving a strange result?

That is, questions that ask about a very unusual situation and become popular as a result. You're asking whether the askers knew about the strange behavior and asked in an attempt to gain popularity.
The answer is not to worry about it (and certainly not to flag it), for two reasons:

Unusual situations like these do pop up in programming, and the best thing to do about them is ask on StackOverflow. In the case of the Shanghai 1927 time difference, the asker could easily have been comparing times a few years apart and found that they weren't giving the expected result, then narrowed it down to that specific gap. (Notice that the asker lives in China, so it's certainly not surprising he'd be using that time zone).
Even if it is a setup (and there certainly isn't evidence, or even a "smell", in either of these cases), who cares? Even if someone is simply showing an exciting piece of programming trivia in the form of a question, does that make it not worthy of the community's interest and appreciation?
Look at the "branch prediction" question. It has over 200,000 views: that's over 200,000 people who have learned about branch prediction failure thanks to the question (or, if they already knew about it, got to read an exceptional explanation). It is the first result in Google for "branch prediction failure." In what way is that question not making the internet a better place?
Indeed, you'll note that the community itself doesn't usually mind even if is clear someone is asking a question about a situation they know the answer to. The same user who asked the branch prediction failure question also asked When does invoking a member function on a null instance result in undefined behavior?, which is a rather specific and yet interesting situation, and received many upvotes for it. But in that case, he had answered his own question- it was a way of sharing his knowledge in a question-and-answer format. There's nothing wrong with that, and when the community judges questions like these, it's judging them on the same criteria as other questions- that it is clear and useful to future users.

One other suggestion: If you really are bothered that some users are gaining "easy rep" by asking questions about very interesting situations, try "constructing" one of your own (and, if you like, answering it yourself). I guessing that you'll find it's nearly not ne as easy as you think. And if you do have such an interesting question ("setup" though it may be) that it will go viral and attract hundreds of thousands of views, then what are you waiting for? Share it with the world!

