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Reducing the salary after job offer? is getting a lot of attention, probably because it started out as a "bad stuff happened to me - is this ethical?" question, which is a magnet for opinions and anecdotes. It is currently +58/-2. I have edited the question to focus more on the "why would they do this?" aspect, which is at least an answerable question. (I see no close votes, so did that instead of mod-closing as "primarily opinion-based".)

Two of the answers are anecdotes that, to me, stop short of actually answering the question. This one is +31/-1 and this one is +6/-4. Both tell stories and offer opinions about the unethical nature of what happened, but neither answers why a company would do this. One of these answers has attracted NAA flags.

What if anything should be done with this question and its answers?

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Both answers are low quality, chatty, tangential musings, one at +6/-4 is more prominently so and has been luckily caught on that faster and double-luckily has quickly got a comment clearly pointing the issue to readers.

As for the answers score, in this case it has very little to do with their quality. Per my observations, the question has been stuck in the hot list for about 3 days which substantially skewed voting.

Broken quality norms in hot questions at smaller sites are business as usual, of other recent examples it happened at Programmers yesterday:

...there's 100x larger Stack Overflow and hot list at sidebar sends at us ignorant voters "armed" with association bonus. Our site is just too small for 24x7 "close duty" to guarantee properly handling questions before they arrive... and when they arrive, it's often all over - their votes and views trash all the efforts of community regulars (as it happened here)

Above rant mentions "question" and "close duty", but if you only replace these with "answer" and "voting duty", it will precisely describe the very issue you ask about.


Given above, I believe the right thing to do would be to delete both answers (as these both now have moderator comment explaining what's wrong). Score being positive / high shouldn't protect the garbage, we already have had the experience deleting low quality / highly voted answers in another hot question, and as one of moderators pointed back then:

When it comes to moderation, I hold positively scored posts to a higher standard than the negative ones.

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