Up- and Down- voting on non-answers

Question

I encountered a non-answer earlier, the essence of which was "try these particular debugging strategies to find out what's actually happening." It didn't actually attempt to answer the question, though, as the OP hadn't yet provided enough information to reliably reproduce the problem. While considering flagging or downvoting the answer, I noticed again the tooltip text for the upvote and downvote buttons:

• This answer is useful.
• This answer is not useful.

Now, perhaps the text "this answer" is supposed to restrict the applicability to actual answers (i.e., it could be read as "This is, in fact, an answer, and this answer is useful." The (non-)answer already has two upvotes, and I agree that it is useful (it may end up helping the OP find a solution to the problem), but it's not really an answer. A later user with the same problem wouldn't be able to fix the problem with this answer; they'd have to follow the same debugging process and hope to have at least as much luck as the original OP did.

What do people typically do in this case? I'm tempted to flag as "not an answer" and simultaneously upvote for the "good advice" factor (after all, it is useful), but that feels a bit weird. We should definitely be flagging, but should any voting occur? I think what this really boils down to is:

1. Should we vote at all on non-answers?
2. If we do vote, do we:
   1. vote on the content as what it is (i.e., whether it's useful in some way or not) and treat voting as orthogonal to whether it's an answer or not; or
   2. downvote because it's not useful as an answer to the specific question.

Note 1: If we take approach 2.1 and vote on the content as useful or not, then that's an argument for preserving upvotes during the answer to comment conversion, but that's not the topic of this question. It's discussed in Answers converted to comments should retain upvotes .

Note 2: As an aside, this is distinct from the problem mentioned in Why do people upvote obvious non-answers? where the non-answers are of the "I have this problem, too!" variety.

Answer 1

In order to maintain the potency of the site as a place to find answers for questions, the coupling between a question and responses that directly answer that question should be guarded as closely as possible. Therefore, an answer is only good if it is good within the context of the question. While "There are 360 degrees in a circle" is correct and useful to know, it is not relevant when someone asks, "What is the chemical composition of bronze?" If the percentage of these sort of answers rises, the potency of the site (in terms of 'finding relevant answers to specific questions' instead of 'finding useful general knowledge') decreases.

So, within the context of the question even an answer with 'good advice' isn't a 'good answer'. I don't think a downvote is necessary particularly, but commenting that the answer isn't directly relevant and flagging is probably appropriate. Even if you do upvote, the flagging will probably (eventually) clear these answers out.

Answer 2

If the non-answer is short enough that it could be a comment, then it probably should be, and you should flag it as "not an answer".

However, sometimes, when a question does not provide enough information to answer it definitively, it may be useful to ask the OP to, say, carry out a series of diagnostic steps in order to determine what the actual problem is. Similarly, sometimes one might not be able to fully answer a question, but might still have some relevant, non-trivial information that could potentially help the OP or someone else come up with a real answer.

Ideally, such non-answers should be posted as comments, but the comment box is rather limited in both length and formatting capabilities. In such cases, when this has happened to me, my approach has been to post the information as if it were an answer, but prefix it with an explicit note like:

"This is not a real answer. It should be a comment, but it's too long for the comment box. Please do not upvote this."

I might also consider marking the non-answer as Community Wiki, but usually I haven't done that, especially if I'm hoping that I might be able to turn it into a real answer later when more information becomes available. If somebody wants to upvote (or downvote) it anyway despite the note, I figure it's their own choice.

I've done this a couple of times myself over the years on various SE sites, and haven't noticed anyone really objecting to it, at least as long as it's not done too often. In fact, in at least one case, the "non-answer" ended up eventually getting two upvotes and accepted(!).

Answer 3

If you think it's not an answer, don't vote on it. Would you click a button labelled "this cake was delicious!" after drinking a fantastic cup of coffee?

Upvotes may mislead a moderator who is quickly processing not an answer flags. Actually, so may downvotes, since some people use "not an answer" to mean "not a correct answer". Prove that you believe it not to be an answer by not voting on it, by giving more weight to "this cake" than "was delicious".

Answer 4

I would agree that "try these things, and maybe we can help you" makes more sense as a comment than an answer, and shouldn't be upvoted/encouraged. On the other hand, there are a number of cases where the original poster hasn't done a lot yet (either from laziness, or because they have little to no idea what they're doing to start with) where I would say that a general "point them in the right direction" answer (which provides basic understanding, rather than, say, code) is the best way to go. I wouldn't want people downvoting/flagging teaching answers of that variety using this as precedent.