Why do high rep users answer bad questions?

Question

Look at this question (10K only) that was just asked a little while ago. Two people with >8000 and one with >63k answered the question. With that much rep, they must know that what-should-I-learn-next questions are not appropriate. Why aren't people with >63k voting to close instead of answering the question?

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Update as the Q has been deleted, here's the whole (yes, whole) body:

I would like to start learning programming and making web pages. I started with learning html. First of all is this a good start? It will help me in the future with learning "important "programming languages like c++? And secondly, what is an appropriate study plan for learning html?

Answer 1

They might well know that it isn't a good fit for the site, but they likely still want to help the person asking the question, so try to pop in a helpful answer before it is closed.

I have answered questions before and voted to close them at the same time. It might not be a good question (ie, not a good fit for Q&A) but it still might be a good question.

In the question you linked, yes, it isn't a question that works well on SO, it is (sort of) open to interpretation and there isn't a few lines of code that will answer it - but surely you don't look at it and think Bah, what a waste of time this was... Some peep out there is asking for help, and he is getting it. In that case, I am glad that it was answered by folks with loads of rep, the answers probably had more insight into it than someone who started programming two weeks ago.

I would personally be much happier to answer a question like this and possibly really help someone than find a syntax error someone, or write a quick answer for a code beggar who can't be bothered to do it themselves.

Lastly - and this is from a game theory point of view - you will probably find that a lot of the high rep users will answer pretty much every question that pops into their queue, whether it is a good one or not. I mean, someone doesn't get to 63k rep by being picky and choosy with what they answer right? :)

Really Lastly - to back up the comment about getting the message below: I asked this question on SO before I really understood the format there. I still think it is a good question, it got voted to a +10 (some downvotes included) and it got some utterly fantastic answers. Having that question closed by a mod as it didn't fit the Q&A format taught me a good lesson - SO isn't the site for these. In this exact example, probably programmers@ would have been better, and I know that now, but I learned it by having it closed. Until that time, I thought it was a great question to ask.

Answer 2

Why do high rep users answer bad questions?

Provided that those users exactly know the site's rules as to which questions can be asked or not (with such a lot of reputation, this is IMO a fair assumption), it's because they desperately need more reputation; it's for them so addictive that it's never enough.

Just vote for close yourself and if possible also for the delete. If the question get ultimately deleted, they'll lose all the earned rep as well -if any. That'll hopefully learn them to not answer questions which do not belong on Stack Overflow at all; we namely don't want to make Stack Overflow more attractive for this kind of bad questions because there are "always" this kind of users who answer them anyway. All those bad questions would only scare away the real good users/answerers.

Answer 3

Of course they know better. They also know that any reputation increases will beat the few questions that get closed or deleted.

The only way to change this is to change the culture:

• Make closing something that is a Good Thing™. Right now it's an accepted evil, but the community still gravitates towards opening (find a closed question, and bring it up on Meta, more often than not it gets reopened).
• Have a more proactive community in the realm of deleting questions that add nothing to the Stack Overflow corpus.

The review queue goes a long way to address these problems, but until we see a much higher number of people close things, we're going to have this keep happening.

Answer 4

Even bad questions can have very good answers, which are a major contribution to the site. There is a badge for this: the Reversal Badge. It is one of the hardest badges to get, too.

Also, if properly edited, bad questions can become very good questions. Depends on the question.

Answer 5

Sometimes a helpful suggestion may still be useful to the poster, even if the question isn't a good fit for SO. This is especially true if the answer helps the poster write better questions in the future, and in that case, coming from an established user may make the poster more willing to heed the advice, even though they may be upset that their question was closed.

I think that's not a bad way to keep the site in line while still engaging with users who haven't quite hit the mark.

Answer 6

I think the people that answered just see a newb programmer, they want to offer a helping hand. I think they know it's going to be closed but they want an answer to be given to this newb before the question gets closed/deleted -- hence why they don't vote to close/delete.