16

Do answers to questions that didn't come with attempts, and are just like "do my homework", deserving of a downvote?

Example :

Filtering out numbers that have sequential- consecutive or non-consecutive digits

In just 5 minutes after I posted my answer there I got 3 down votes without leaving any comments, so at first I thought it's because maybe I didn't include explanation of what does myy answer do while I was on my way to adding explanation but I'm quite slow since my native in not English.

after I finished editing, I only got one down-vote reverted bur still 2 was there and I really don't know how people voting down for what reason there except maybe it was inappropriate in their opinion to answer to the question which is asked for "do my homework".

if this is the reason of downvote to my answer or another answer there, then what is community saying for this kind of questions? do we really should not answer to these questions? if yes then more than half of Q&A in this site are just asked for "do my homework" and all we should downvote then?

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30

Both questions and answers should be voted on purely on their own merits.

If someone writes a comprehensive answer to a marginally asked question, it's not appropriate to downvote such an answer, IMO. In all cases, the question should be edited if possible to improve it as much as possible and the answer should be voted on based on their own independent quality.

There is even a badge to reinforce this point called the "reversal" which is awarded when someone is able to provide a solid answer to a poor question.

There's only ever been 2 awarded on this site 8-). I attribute this to our sites willingness to edit poorly written questions so that they never reach the -5 threshold required to trigger this.

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  • 2
    I've rarely seen questions with lower than -3 on U&L. I figured that was because it wasn't worth downvoting such a question any lower (they're often from low scoring / new users anyway). – roaima Sep 27 '18 at 9:53
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    @roaima - same here, we as a community are pretty consistent about this, we either vote things up strongly or down to the ~-3 level, or close/delete it. It's one of the reasons I prefer this site to some of the other SE's. – slm♦ Sep 27 '18 at 13:14
11

The description for answer vote reads "this answer is/is not useful". If the question isn't great but the answer is clearly useful, the answer should not be down voted.

If the question is too vague, it becomes hard to write useful and meaningful answers. If you find an answer to such question to be not useful, it is the reason down vote is there.

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