Can/should we discourage opining in answers?

Question

There has been alot of opining on the asides of questions lately. People feel the need to express their opinion on how awful the situation is and how they would handle it even though it is not part of the question.

I think this is our biggest answer problem. Is there some way we can effectively discourage this? These types of answers tend to get up-votes for the opining even if their answer is not good.

Answer 1

While this information is somewhat buried in the depths of the FAQ, I thought I'd highlight a point from How to Answer:

Answer the question

Read the question carefully. What, specifically, is the question asking for? Make sure your answer provides that – or a viable alternative. The answer can be “don’t do that”, but it should also include “try this instead”. Any answer that gets the asker going in the right direction is helpful, but do try to mention any limitations, assumptions or simplifications in your answer. Brevity is acceptable, but fuller explanations are better.

The way I interpret this is that if someone asks how to do X in situation Y, it's perfectly acceptable to explain that it's not a good idea and why, and then explain an alternative and explain why the alternative is better.

This happens all the time on Stack Overflow. For instance, if someone asks a question about how to properly format chat messages received in a Web based chat, and I see they're using polling, I'll let them know that polling just isn't really the way to go. As an aside, I'll provide an answer to their questions as it applies to polling, assuming there is an answer, but I'm always sure to explain why it's just not a good idea.

I see nothing wrong with this approach.

However, if someone didn't address the full question, then we may want to suggest they add more information. I do this by asking follow up questions to the answerers, but the follow ups are taken from the question itself. This is one way we can get people to add more to their answers without putting them on the defensive.

Also, in some other instances, there's an implied answer. For example, one answerer explained that vacation time is an entitlement and part of your pay, but he didn't explicitly say, "So take your darn vacation already :)". So, I just added that part in as an edit so it was clearer to others that he was saying the asker should take his well-deserved vacation.

Lastly, I feel it's difficult to discuss this without specific examples. We discuss specific questions here all the time, so feel free to bring in examples of answers as well. As long as we do it in a respectful manner, we should be able to have an effective discussion about what we can do better. Hope this helps! :)

Answer 2

I agree completely tolerance of "I think/feel like you should do XXX (even though your question was about something different!)" types of answer are a huge problem here. In fact, I've written a (small?) treatise on this subject.

I have fewer problems when answers are:

Here is the answer to your question from an objective perspective

....

That being said, I think you should do XXX or I think you should be asking YYYY

---

The problem is we frequently get

I think you should do XXX

or

Here's the answer to a different question!

types of answers which don't even answer the question but still get upvoted. People have said previously they don't want to DV these answers as long as they are useful (and it is really easy given the content of our site to add a useful but non-answer, see here, specifically "Everyone is an expert here (or can pretend...)."

This answer (as well as a lot of other answers there) is a particularly good example of this problem - the question has always been a question centered around culture differences at all points in the revision history - but many answers never addressed this part of the question! Chad and I discussed this in chat too at the time.

My point is: none of the answers to that question initially addressed the core problem the asker specifically articulated. All of them were "oh you are wondering about whether to take your vacation time? yah you should take it!" answers. None of them addressed the reasons the asker felt uncomfortable with taking the vacation time (including the top answer; this has been changed since the last update however).

---

I should add a disclaimer that I am consistently posting comments along the lines of "this doesn't answer the question" when I see this... so it should be fairly obvious my thoughts on this whole matter :-)

Answer 3

@jmort253, I felt the best way to address your comment question was to add another answer.

Here is the question.

The question was:

• Can anyone suggest a better way of handling something like this so that I do not exclude myself from consideration?

---

Here are my thoughts on all the answers:

• First answer - this answers the question fine, provides explanation
• Second answer - this provides an answer which is an alternative to the top voted one, but makes no attempt to distinguish "personal advice" vs "answering question"ness
• Third answer - this also answers question well, provides explanation, and provides a clear "if I were you" distinction
• Fourth answer - this copies content from the first answer effectively by combining phrases together, doesn't really add anything but got upvoted
• Fifth answer - this doesn't even attempt to answer the question
• Sixth answer - this one is worse, because it contains misleading content (regarding legality) and also doesn't even attempt to answer the question yet only received 2 downvotes as of writing
• Seventh answer - while technically an answer, it's really poor quality and doesn't even attempt to explain "why"
• Eighth answer - I'm including this because the user has 1k+ rep here, but it doesn't even attempt to address the specific question

Other than the top three answers and two "delete me" answers, there were 6 answers to that question which were mediocre at best -- with the only one receiving more than two downvotes being the "I'm a bad poster" answer posted in a spamming spree.

---

Another question

Here is the most popular question we've gotten on here as far as I know. Doing the same thing:

• First answer - this is a good answer, though it ignores the "why" factor completely for much of it and doesn't actually say
• Second answer - this is the best answer I think, though, it basically just expands a prior answer (third)
• Third answer - pretty decent answer, not really explained but mostly self explanatory
• Fourth answer - this is also a decent answer, since it explains "why" employee should be fired, but is still pretty "meh"
• Fifth answer - this answer basically ignores the heart of the question and tells the asker, "sorry you should just deal with it" when the question is clear this is not an easy nor feasible option
• Sixth answer - good suggestion for how to solve the problem
• Seventh answer - this basically copies the fourth answer and only adds additional personal content
• Eighth answer - this answer literally says "I'm not sure anybody can really give you much advice here" and yet received only 1 downvote when all it does is expand on that
• Ninth answer - this answer is TERRIBLE by subjective answer standards; 3 downvotes
• Tenth answer - this doesn't answer the question at all, and basically repeats content elsewhere anyways (1 DV)
• Eleventh answer - this answer basically says "idk what you should do" but only got 3 DVs
• Twelfth answer - this adds nothing new, but, hey, it at least answers the question

The rest are very much repeating previous answers without adding anything, with the exception of this one which actually might be the best answer in this question.