IMO the answering scheme on SO is where the problem is. People answer quickies and get their upvotes, and walk away thinking they've made the Internet a better place.
Allow me to make a slight generalization here.
What I'm seeing on SO, from monitoring a specific tag on the daily, is a TON of similar questions involving the same handful of bugs, over and over. I finally got my gold badge on SO, so I can now hammer dupes... but a lot of "helpful" answers people put up on SO essentially boil down to this:
Try this:
{some code snippet}
And they get votes. Sure, it helped the OP. Sure, it might help someone that bothers searching for a solution to their problem... but it says what, not why, and doesn't explain how.
After spending quite some time reviewing code on CR, I've noticed a strange side-effect in my SO answering: I don't post quickies anymore. I just can't help explaining what's going on, why the compiler is throwing such or such error, how it's solved, and how to avoid it in the future... and it's not rare that I'll also point out problems the OP didn't ask about, but that are glaring in their code and just waiting to be the subject of their next SO question.
As a result, I end up spending anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes on a SO answer, which isn't too far off from the amount of effort I could put in a decent CR answer. And when I walk away I know I've made the Internet a better place.
So my conclusion is, CR isn't the problem. SO's voting culture is. I don't upvote "Try this: {code dump}" answers on SO. If people want a quick copy-pasta solution instead of actually understanding what's going on, it's their loss, and IMO that's not what SO was made for.
The best SO answers are the ones where the author clearly put a lot of time and effort. These are the answers that should be getting the votes. If they aren't, it's not CR's fault - it's SO's voting culture that's broken.
As for "words per vote"... as others have said, that's not a useful metric, specifically because you can post "helpful" answers that don't explain anything on SO and get votes for it.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
If SO's voting culture didn't value copy-pasta solutions that don't teach anything, your metrics would be quite different.
