How to discourage crowd-pleasing non-answers?

Question

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3st-Hai1y54

A lot of good and fairly specific questions on P.SE end up getting answers that are witty, abstract, agreeable and popular -- but have no substance, and don't really answer the question.

I don't like to be a buzzkill, but I really don't think we at P.SE need to be reminded that whitespace is good or that we don't like closed-minded employers or that stopping learning isn't conducive to learning.

Sure, there can be wisdom in tautologies, but they seldom answer questions, and when said plainly, their messages are quite mundane.

The problem is that simply down-voting them isn't enough, because popular answers have a lot of votes, even if they're not necessarily good.

Are there ways when you ask a question to discourage these kinds of answers? Or is there anything policy-wise that could be done?

Answer 1

Demand people back up their claims with data, then:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-subjective/

Great subjective questions insist that opinion be backed up with facts and references. Opinion isn’t all bad, so long as it’s backed up with something other than “because I’m an expert”, or “because I said so”, or “just because”. Use your specific experiences to back up your opinions, as above, or point to some research you’ve done on the web or elsewhere that provides evidence to support your claims. We like you. We want to believe you. But like wikipedia itself, {{citation needed}}. And good subjective questions make this clear from the outset: back it up!

Answer 2

Seems you didn't like my rather open-minded answer... :)

Let's talk serious.

1) I'd be very much interested in writing good elaborate answers. I actually have done so on numerous occasions. You know what? People don't read them.

Can't tell you how many times I wrote single-line answers to get numerous votes and immediately after adding "substance" as you call it the voting ended up abruptly.

I actually learned this tactic from seasoned high-rep users (40K+) on SO.

People just don't want to read the stuff. I can't do anything to change them.

If I see folks don't read my answers, I have no motivation of writing them really.

At the very least I can amuse myself by seeing numbers tick (rep growing).

2) The other reason is that by the time you finished writing an elaborate answer there will be 10+ single-lined answers voted up to the heaven. Nobody will notice yours.

Who's to blame if the site is all about being the Fastest Gun in the West?

I suppose the blame is partially on the site creator.

There have been COUNTLESS proposals on how to change the operational model to realign to the quality rather than to quantity and mass. They were all turned down. The creator is very stubborn and doesn't want to listen to input.

Even I proposed an improvement - lock out answers display for the first N minutes to give everyone sufficient time to contribute quality answers - I got laughed at.

(Just tried to locate that old question of mine - seems it was deleted. So much for user voice.)

That other trick with limiting reputation growth to 200 per day only results in newcomers desperately trying to reach the elder by contributing an insane amount of answers, quality evidently suffers here.

You can also see with all that stackexchange expansion that the creators do not concern themselves with the conceptual problems - it's now all about growth, expansion, consumption of markets, going public and so on.

At that time I'm starting to hope somebody will start a different Q&A site - with the right priorities and with the right attitude.

Answer 3

From that same blog post, reads the following:

2. Great subjective questions tend to have long, not short, answers. The best subjective questions inspire your peers to share their actual experiences, not just post a mindless one-liner or cartoon in hopes of being rewarded with upvotes for being merely “first.” Sharing an experience takes at least one paragraph; ideally several paragraphs. If I’m asking about how to bake cookies, don’t give me a list of grocery items: milk. butter. vanilla. eggs. There is virtually nothing I can learn from a short, static list of grocery items that make up a recipe. Instead, tell me what happened the last time you made cookies from that recipe! Share your detailed experiences, so that we all might learn from them.

Most of the short one-liners we're seeing just don't meet this guideline. My suggestion is that no one upvote the one-liners, unless it's the only answer you agree with. My suggestion is to support those who put thought into their answers.

As far as "backing it up with references", that's a bit of a contradiction in some cases. Some questions fit guideline #2 in that it's about your experiences and not what is on Wikipedia.

If I made chocolate chip cookies and I used dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate and they tasted better, that's my experience, and I'm not famous enough to have a Wikipedia article about me citing my taste in chocolate.

In summary, I think it's okay to insist on references if the question calls for it, but that rule will clearly not apply in every situation.

Answer 4

I was directed here to present alternative point of view, so sorry to bump up again an issue you all consider closed.

I don't think there is anything wrong with answers that contain just only one sentence. Quite contrary, I think in some situations they are wayyy better than useless essays about whole array of possible (not necessarily relevant) options. To be more precise, there are answers out there that are long and detailed, but if you try to draw clear conclusions from them, you simply can't do it. I think Jeff Atwood is right in his blog entry: How to Write Without Writing. It is very important for technical people to communicate their ideas. A person not saying much, where something needs to be clarified isn't going to be understood. Frankly the same applies to person that talks a lot, but somehow "drifts away" and ends up taking about minor "side" issues. What is worse, most of the time such person won't finish his talk with a simple sentence that somehow "sums up" all the issues he was talking about. He just stops talking, causing even more confusion. I personally draw "equal" sign between two examples above. For me all those people have problems communicating their ideas, even when at a first glance second case is quite different.

The problem is that P.SE has quite a lot of those "long & pointless" answers. At first sight it looks promising. You keep on reading and waste some time only to find out, you don't know exactly what the guy is suggesting as an answer. I can't provide you with such answer right now as an example to illustrate this, but I'll try to fish one out and add it here. Anyway that leaves the reader with feeling of wasted time and a confusion. Just like your brain was somehow poisoned by the lack of logic in what you have just read. Sometimes you are lucky and you get a long, detailed and very consistent answer. Yes, those are also out there, but from my personal experience long pointless answers are much more common.

So, in my personal opinion the quality of answer has nothing to do with it's lenght. It has more to do with how people understand an answer. Communicating is not about producing a stream of words. Its about combining them in such way, that your reader clearly understands your intentions. To me the only way to measure answer quality is the vote system with the following rules:

• I understand the answer, I strongly agree with it = upvote
• I understand the answer, I strongly disagree with it = downvote
• I don't understand the answer or not really sure how I feel = no action

If you think that is how it works right now, you're wrong. Using the Jeff quote as a basis a lot of people downvote certain answer just because it is too short and not because it is wrong.

So... I don't think P.SE schould encourage/discourage certain type of answer. If somebody wants to write short answer -- let it be. Other people with the help of voting system will decide if this is enough information or not.

Answer 5

Crowd pleasing answers must serve some social dynamic purpose for a community. An outlet for this behavior should be allowed (repression isn't healthy).

The stack design uses "community reputation" and "bounties" to support and promote positive and constructive behaviors. The same concepts should be applied to this issue of "crowd pleasing answers" as well.

I leave this to those with more experience and wisdom than myself.