Why was my Secret Hat answer deleted?

Question

I posted an answer on the Winterbash 2014 secret hats post which has now been deleted. Why was my answer deleted? I'm pretty confident that post is what got me the Eureka hat, so I can't understand why it was removed.

It's been said that the purge was due to duplicate answers, but that doesn't make sense to me either. No where else on the SE network do good, upvoted answers get deleted by moderators. I don't see anything special about MSE that makes it any different. Is there something special about MSE that this is acceptable behavior?

I understand why the joke posts were removed, but to be fair about it, then someone should have removed the joke from the only existing answer left on the question too.

Answer 1

I don't really have any more information for you than has already been said in animuson's answer and the comments, but since you asked...

It wasn't just your post that was removed; it was all but the one answer that actually was a complete answer (listed all the secret hats and had correct information about how to earn them). Your answer wasn't treated differently from any of the others that were deleted, so the following explanation is for the treatment of the thread as a whole.

That thread was a complete mess. In hindsight, it should have been community wiki with a single wiki answer from the beginning, but once it started accumulating answers, we let it go for a while. After all the secret hats were discovered, though, the thread turned into kind of a disaster. There were a lot of partial-(or complete) repeat answers, wrong answers from people who clearly hadn't read previous answers, and, just before I deleted all those answers, a lot of joke answers.

I cleaned up and locked the thread for several reasons:

1. All the secret hats were reported on that page, which means no new Eureka hats would be awarded for further posts there.
2. Deleting duplicate answers would not mean that any Eureka hats would be revoked.
3. The post had already been community wiki for a while, meaning no one was earning new reputation for their answers there.
4. The post was flagged more than once asking for the type of cleanup I performed, and I agreed with the request.
5. Having a single, complete answer would make the post much more useful and readable to future visitors.

MSE is often different from all the "main" Q&A sites, but this post really comes down to one of the core goals for any Stack Exchange site: to leave useful artifacts. I'm sorry if the cleanup caused you to be confused or upset by lost reputation, but I stand by the decision.

Answer 2

Because that question turned into a FAQ. Maybe it wasn't a formal one with the fancy red tag, but it was a FAQ nonetheless.

Questions of that form benefit from having one neatly organized answer that contains all the information relevant to answering the question. Sometimes if the information is too much to fit into one answer, it can be split into multiple answers.

Questions like that severely suffer when there are a whole bunch of answers all saying somewhat the same thing with those little differences. Then we're not really answering questions any more, but just confusing users as they wonder "Which answer is the right answer?" They keep reading through more information not gaining any further understanding.

The practice of deleting all the other answers once they've all been integrated into a single answer is very common for FAQs here on Meta. Most users just don't notice it because FAQs tend to develop over time and the other answers don't end up deleted until well after the reputation effects have been made permanent and the discussion has died down. Winterbash is unique, though, in that the event is more heavily advertised and only runs for a short amount of time.

To put it simply: this was an act of general clean-up. Removing all the noise and repetition so that users can easily find the information they desire is definitely a good thing.

Answer 3

As one of the authors of a non-joke answer that was deleted, I'm disappointed by the characterization that the rest of the answers on that question were useless or duplicates. I made six revisions to my answer to ensure it was somewhat detailed and accurate. Rather than simply saying, "do this," I described how I guessed and verified the requirements for the hat; I also discussed the connection between the name of the hat and the method for acquiring it.

The purpose of the consolidated summary answer, at least as I understood it, was to pin the requirements to the top so that users could quickly learn how to earn hats. Given that the event is over and nobody can earn any hats at all, that answer now collects the most useless part of each of the more detailed (non-joke) answers that came before it.

I'm not saying this sort of cleanup is never warranted or that moderators are not within their rights to do it, but I don't see the need for drastic measures here. What possible harm, or even inconvenience, would any user suffer who happens to find an old Q&A about an event that's no longer running, for which there exists a summary answer already pinned to the top by upvotes and acceptance?

I gather there were some flags on the question. There were answers that were clearly jokes. There were answers that were clearly duplicates. It would not have taken an inordinate amount of work to separate the wheat from the chaff, based purely on timestamps and vote counts. It did not need to be done right away; a lock would have been sufficient to keep the problem (assuming you grant it was a problem in the first place) from growing.

But the nail in the coffin of the "we did it for the quality of the site" argument to me is, if the whole point of deleting these answers was to clean up that Q&A and keep the useful bits, why are there still 80-odd comments hanging around on those posts? Those are the low-hanging fruit, after all; almost every one is idle chatter and/or obsolete. The notice that was added to the question even says it was "locked due to the high amount of off-topic comments generated."

I'm guessing this sounds like an angry answer but honestly, it's just that my sinuses are killing me and I have a tendency to extreme loquacity; to express how I really feel, here's Jean-Luc Picard. This was an unusually ham-handed reaction to a real molehill of a problem. It did a little harm in the form of lost reputation and bruised egos. It unjudiciously wiped a bunch of content, some of which was crap and some of which was not, from an interesting Q&A. The result is more concise, which is good, and more boring, which is bad.

Forgive me for not coming to a more satisfying conclusion, but my face feels like it's about to step into an alternate dimension. If I decide there's important content in my deleted answer that would be useful as part of the consolidated "FAQ style" answer, I'll edit it in. Anyone else whose answer was deleted is free to do the same. Okay. I'm going to Rite Aid now.