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What would be the downsides of having a “you break it, you fix it” policy in the dev team with the goal of reducing bugs? had so far elicited 16 answers, many of which are not much more than repeats of posts of other answers or commentary.

Is there a way to prevent this from worsening?

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  • I just checked the question again (20 "answers" now) and had the option to "protect" it. I've never seen this option before on any question. It also was not there earlier when there were 16 answers - but I was using mobile this morning, and now I'm using desktop. Does that make a difference?
    – HorusKol
    Feb 9, 2020 at 3:24
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    For the protection, see the details in the help page on this privilege. You can only protect a question that's at least 24 hours old, that's probably why you didn't see it before.
    – Lilienthal Mod
    Feb 9, 2020 at 12:56
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    related: When there are many answers already, help me check that mine won't repeat others
    – gnat
    Feb 9, 2020 at 17:14
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    @Lilienthal for our site, there was an adjustment allowing 15K users protect immediately. Most likely reason is mobile, I think I tested this (at site where I have enough rep to protect) and it indeed lacked the option to protect. Other possible reason could be there were no answers from users with less than 10 on-site rep - in this case 15K users can't protect
    – gnat
    Feb 9, 2020 at 19:35
  • Simply vote for one of Joe's posts to make sure the right answer comes to the top
    – Old_Lamplighter
    Feb 10, 2020 at 4:02
  • @gnat News to me, thanks for digging that up. Might be worth it if you self-answer a post on that here on meta to make that more visible.
    – Lilienthal Mod
    Feb 10, 2020 at 12:24
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    @Lilienthal it's already in meta: here "2014-01-21: trusted users at TWP can protect questions without having to wait 24 hours"
    – gnat
    Feb 10, 2020 at 12:26
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    Doesn't show up in all searches but it is searchable so works for me. Thanks @gnat!
    – Lilienthal Mod
    Feb 10, 2020 at 12:33

2 Answers 2

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What would be the downsides of having a “you break it, you fix it” policy in the dev team with the goal of reducing bugs? had so far elicited 16 answers, many of which are not much more than repeats of posts of other answers or commentary.

Is there a way to prevent this from worsening?

It's not clear why having more answers is "worse".

But the only real response is to upvote the answers that you feel are "best", and downvote answers that you think are "worse".

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    Mostly that answers after the initial 5 or 6 aren't bringing any thing new. Fair enough on the downvotes, but I tend to reserve that for wrong or dangerous answers
    – HorusKol
    Feb 9, 2020 at 12:25
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    @HorusKol - there is nothing in the system that stops folks with enough rep to add an answer, if they feel like doing so. Nothing to be done about that.
    – Joe Strazzere
    Feb 9, 2020 at 12:39
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    Mostly that answers after the initial 5 or 6 aren't bringing any thing new. Fair enough on the downvotes, but I tend to reserve that for wrong or dangerous answers consider also that comments can be used to suggest improvements to answers. If you see someone post a new answer that is a duplicate of an existing answer, instead of downvoting, you can use a comment to ask them to edit their answer in a way that makes it unique from the existing duplicate.
    – dwizum
    Feb 10, 2020 at 16:35
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Ideally speaking, you'd avoid re-treading exactly the same ground as previous answers. But having different versions of a similar theme of answer with small differences isn't actually that bad - it allows people to vote for which they like best.

Generally, the more answers there are to a question the better the voting system can work to give readers an informed opinion of how "good" the community considers various approaches versus each other - I think that's a net positive.

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