Why should answers be long?

Question

I recently got an automated message that "we're looking for long answers..." It seems weird to insist on a lot of words if a few words gets the point across, and who is the "we" who decided what kind of answers "we want?"

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Edited because people on here like lots of words :)

One of the tenets of good writing is not to use more words than are necessary to convey an idea, so it seems to me that insisting on extra words does not increase the quality of the answers, though it may increase the time spent on each page. Perhaps that statistic is important to getting out of beta, but it just seems a poor way to achieve the goal.

I think Yannis' answer is a fantastic example of an answer with a whole lot of words in it that doesn't say very much. Obviously, I read the notice when it came up, but it seemed kind of arrogant and more of an opinion than anything else.

To me, it's self-evident that if you're offering an answer to a question that you're recommending it as a solution because you think that's what the person should do. So insisting that that be included in the answer is just silly.

In addition, people are taking their time out to try to help someone, in a forum where the subject matter could impact the poster's career. Obviously, some people choose to be more anonymous than others, but it seems to me that if you're one of those who cares whether you're upvoted or downvoted, you're not going to be user123456789. So, sometimes the brevity may stem from not wanting to say something that could potentially cause an issue in the poster's current or potential future position. Would you really prefer such people offer no help at all?

I've only asked one question (due to the fact that most questions I might ask are about dealing with a team that doesn't want to move as technologically fast as I do and I'm afraid my frustration might result in a pattern of questions that might make me appear really negative should I decide to move on or should someone on my team see it), but the best answer I got was in a comment. I couldn't mark it as correct, obviously. It's possible that the person posting the comment might have put that as an answer had this rule not been in place. Now, I have a 0% acceptance rate and she didn't get the rep she deserves (if she cares).

The links Yannis posted were somewhat useful, in that they provided the context that not everyone was in agreement about whether short answers were even a problem. They did not answer the underlying question about why those (IMO reasonable) voices were overridden and who decided to send out the automated messages, despite the conflicting opinions.

It also seems that the discussions he posted were as much a "moment in time" of a specific self-selected group of workplace users. If the question were to be posted on the regular Workplace site, would the active Workplace users today agree that short answers are bad?

Finally, it seems to me that preventing short answers and insisting people put them in comments can result in really long comment threads, which can be much harder to follow (you're not sure if it's actually an answer that someone was afraid to post because it was short and they didn't want their rep nuked, or if it's just a random person weighing in for some other reason).

Answer 1

The full text of the post notice is:

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you're recommending it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted. See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more information.

The notice itself answers your question, at least partially, answers should provide some explanation and context. The Workplace strives to be a high quality and low noise Q&A site, I think the expectation for answers that explain their premise (and ideally back it up with references) isn't unreasonable.

Furthermore the post notice points you to a blog post, have you read it? The more relevant quote from it is:

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.

Please read all of it, if you haven't already. Short answers are not inherently bad, but a more thorough answer is almost always preferable.

As for the "we", it refers to the community. Post notices are applied by moderators, typically at the request of regular users (via flags), and The Workplace community has favoured longer and non repetitive answers since the early days of the site. Even if the answer hasn't been flagged, moderators are generally expected to enforce the community's standards, which typically originate from Meta discussions. Some relevant Meta discussions:

• What can we do about one line answers?
• Are "it depends" answers a sign of a bad question?
• "I don't know" isn't an answer
• Do we need a policy on bad/"me too" answers?
• Has answer quality improved since the early days of this site?

And the more important discussion is FAQ proposal: Back It Up and Don't Repeat Others, which ironically has a very short answer (but that's only because the answerer is a known troll). The community decided (~reached consensus) to add the "back it up" rule in the FAQ, and the phrasing strongly hints towards more thorough answers:

How should I answer?

Make sure your answer adds helpful information and is a complete, stand-alone answer. Read other answers first and be sure not to completely restate information that has already been posted.

Please note that answers should be backed up either with a reference, or experiences that happened to you personally. You should always include in your answer information about why you think your answer is correct.

Our preference towards more thorough answers is also codified in our "How to Answer" guidelines:

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.

Your answer is a comment at best, sorry to be blunt but it doesn't really stand as an actual answer. We are not here only to get the point across, answers should help solve actual, practical problems, and should be valuable to anyone else that's facing a similar problem as the original asker. Answers that don't fundamentally answer the question might be removed at any time.

Answer 2

I do not "like lots of words." I like answers which provide meaningful information and context so that someone in the future finding this site can get value from it.

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I often search google and find StackOverflow questions. This causes me to really appreciate the difference between short, "here's the answer" questions, and "here's the answer, here's why" questions. If I have a similar issue, one which is not exactly the same - but perhaps super close - I absolutely love having the additional context or explanation a longer, comprehensive answer provides. It bothers me when I find threads on StackOverflow and then realize I have a closely related question but can get no additional insight from the answers listed because they are too short.

This is why I do not like short answers. They do not provide a future reader the context necessary to gain significant value or insight unless the situation is nearly exactly the same as what is asked in the question.

I said it in my comment above: I consistently downvote "answers" which should be comments, because I do not like polluting the site with spam types of answers. I realize downvoting is not necessarily public information by principle but you are asking about this - I am giving you my exact voting philosophy. I downvote answers/questions (as well as upvote) based on the question, "will this be useful in the future to someone coming to this site?"

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Ok, now a practical example. Note the two blocks of text above and separated by the -------- break. The first, before the separation, could have been my answer. It "answers" your question! However, the second provides the necessary context and reasoning such that someone coming here, either yourself or Yannis Rizos or John Galt, will understand my answer and make it valuable.

This distinction, hopefully shown simply by this answer, is why short answers are bad, and longer answers are, in general, better.

Answer 3

Who Applies Post Notices:

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer: please explain why you're recommending it as a solution. Answers that don't explain anything will be deleted. See Good Subjective, Bad Subjective for more information.

This is what is known as a post notice. Diamond moderators and Stack Exchange employees, anyone with a diamond by their name, have the ability to apply a post notice.

In most cases, these are applied in response to community flags. Your answer likely came up in the review queue's "low quality post" filter, due to its length, and some users may have flagged it as "not an answer". Any user with something like 100 or 200 rep can see posts in the review queue, which means just about any user here could have flagged your post as not an answer. Anyone with 15 reputation can flag a post.

In response to flags, one of the moderators likely applied the post notice instead of just outright deleting your answer. The goal, of course, is to give you an opportunity to improve your post and make it valuable to future visitors.

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The rest of this is quite long, but I'm hoping it provides you with an explanation and background, from my perspective, of why the community chose to enforce answer quality:

Stack Exchange Sites are Better than Forums:

Most of the answers on the site, due to this rule, answer the question in their entirety, and they also provide context to help askers and future visitors to know why those answers are right for them. This not only reduces the number of answers, and reduces noise, but also helps people decide what action to take to solve their problem.

If we let everyone post random one-liners everywhere, how useful would 15 to 20 answers on the site be that just didn't explain anything? What it would do is reduce the material to nothing but guesswork for those seeking answers.

Are we discussing Short Answers, or how the community came to this conclusion?

As Yannis said, if you want to rehash the discussion, let's do that. So far, you've just complained about the process of coming to this conclusion months ago and seem to be focusing on that point and trying to call Yannis out for being inconsistent.

What is your argument for allowing these short, one-liner answers? How does this add value to this site? How does this make Workplace SE better than some random snapshot on the Internet where someone posted something vague for future visitors to try and interpret years later? This really isn't what Stack Exchange is about, and quality is why this Q&A platform is so popular.

Short Answers Are Not Bad:

As far as short answers go, I'll take a different approach than the people who say short is bad: Short answers are not bad, and an answer shouldn't, in my opinion, be removed simply because it is short. However, short is a symptom of something possibly being amiss with an answer. Either it doesn't answer the question fully, or the answer doesn't explain why it is the right course of action, in most cases.

In some cases, short answers could indicate a problem with the question. Perhaps someone should leave a comment asking the user to provide more details. Maybe a skilled editor can help clarify the post. Possibly, the question just needs to be closed as not a real question.

In many cases, short answers mean there is a problem somewhere, but not always.

Interpretation Of Your Answer:

As a result of my stance on short answers, I've read your answer and reread it again, trying to find a reason to take your side and argue for it to be undeleted. The conclusion I come to is that I'm not 100% sure you answered the full question, but the part you did answer didn't really need explanation because it was so obvious.

You did addressed the issue with being fired, which is a concern for the applicant, but you didn't address whether or not it would be an issue to an employer if the applicant consciously quit after 1 year.

You didn't answer this:

"what would you prefer to see in a job applicant? Exactly one year at the last job or 13-14 months?"

And you didn't answer this:

On the one hand, if I quit after 'one year' it seems more likely to be a conscious choice and something I would have given consideration and planning before doing.

You said:

If you're applying to new jobs while you still have a job, this shouldn't matter, since you obviously haven't left because you were fired.

So, what I get from this is that employers won't think you've been fired if you still have a job, obviously. This makes sense, and again, I agree no real explanation is required here. However, the asker was also concerned that this might make him/her look like he/she planned to leave the job after 1 year, which might look bad to an employer expecting people to stick around and dedicate themselves to 3 or 4 years.

Again, you didn't address that point or explain why this isn't an issue.

Why Context Matters:

To me, it's self-evident that if you're offering an answer to a question that you're recommending it as a solution because you think that's what the person should do. So insisting that that be included in the answer is just silly.

So who are you? We don't know you. I really just met you online a few days ago. You seem like an intelligent person, and I even watched you answer an interesting ActionScript problem on Stack Overflow a few nights ago. You even said ActionScript wasn't your area of expertise, yet you still solved the problem. ;)

However, user1234 doesn't know you. How does user1234 and the countless future visitors to your Workplace post know that the information you give is useful and correct if you don't provide any context to demonstrate it's correct? To user1234, you and I are both just random people on the Internet, so without explanation, it's difficult to tell why a solution is a good solution.

In short, I think you're misunderstanding what the community means by "provide some explanation and context". The community isn't asking you to say "I recommend this explanation because I think it will help you", because you're right, that is silly. Instead, the goal is to explain why on a deeper level. Share your knowledge. Why do you think what you're recommending is helpful? Because you say it is? How can you explain this so that people reading your answer learn from it, instead of merely thinking "I should do this because Amy says so.".

Remember, there's no compiler here to check to see if a solution is good or not. Sometimes, the outcome of an answer on the Workplace may not be clear for months or years, so there's no immediate way for someone to tell if your solution is the one to go with. Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Although I'm probably a pretty famous monologger on The Workplace, I felt compelled to chime in on this one - I don't think word count should be (or is) our big driver here. An answer is good if it is thorough. I tend to flag answers as "too short" if they have so little justification that the only reason I could trust the answer is if I trusted the poster personally.

It seems all the more relevant on The Workplace, since very few of these questions have ever been a single faceted issue. Some technical questions have a very clear, short, correct answer, but almost everything here has some level of trust, belief, or wisdom involved in it, and to prove that your answer really is viable, you need to back it up, not unlike proving a hypothesis.

For the record, any answer this long wouldn't bug me.

Addition:

Apparently, this was a good example of why short answers sometimes fail. According to the question asker, I missed a big element of the question - who is the "mythical we" in the response and do "we" really want it?

I'll submit the thought here that:

1. It's a canned response. All the canned responses on the SE sites tend to adopt the plural to mean the vague sense of the community at any point in time. Looking for much more than that in the intent of canned language is probably futile. It's not a conspiracy theory or anything ... it's just that since there's many mechanisms for user-driven control, they opted for "we" in most of the automated messaging.

2. The "we" who really chime in are:

   • People who down vote a post - requires 125 reputation - and the guidance is here. I'll point out that one peice of guidance is "no effort posts" - so just posting "yep" is usually seen that way, as are really, really glib one liners that are more funny than useful.

   • People who vote to delete a post - requires 2000 reputation - is described as part of the moderator privilege. At the time of the writing of this post there are 32 users with that privilege, but if you're interested and looking at this later - go here and count (I couldn't find another way).

So... at any given time, the "we" certainly does change, although my experience has been that it mostly accumulates. Rabid users with high reputation are pretty likely to stay involved. In no way is this data driven - but of the 2000+ rep users, I notice about 50% of them online every week, and 25% of them daily. I quickly clicked into a few whose usernames I didn't recognize and found that they, too, were pretty active recently - I just haven't noticed them.

So... my advice would be, don't think that the delete-privilege user pool is changing all that quickly. At this point, it may be growing but not so quickly that I think the opinions have done a 180 degree shift.

Also - at any given time, if a post is deleted - it's the users that recommended the deletion that are making the call. I can't speak for others, but I tend to notice the posts I mark for deletion because they are sitting there with a negative vote and I can't see a way to prod the submitter to improve the post (or I see others have tried and failed)...

If other deleters use the same algorithm, then I'd bet that it's not just the deleter pool, but it's swung by any user that downgrades a post.

Sadly, now I've failed in my terseness... There is definitely something to be said for an executive summary, but realize that the elegant, terse writing of an executive summary is often just the lure to get the executive to read at least a few of the details of the paper. I don't have much respect for people who make big decisions based on a one line slogan, and most of the good executives I know will drill down past the summary in one way or another before they move forward on anything. I see the post of an answer as more than just the executive summary.

Answer 5

It seems weird to insist on a lot of words if a few words gets the point across...

Yep. You're not alone.

I've emphasized this on Christianity.SE where it's a far bigger problem.