The limits to a Very Low Quality answer

Question

I was rereading Jeff Atwood's answer to the question: Is the Very Low Quality flag too ambiguous? mainly because today I wanted to use that flag for the first time. Quoting him, this flag means that:

this post, and possibly this user, are totally stinking up the joint and need to be ejected from the premises ASAP.

My hesitation comes because I tend to just downvote a bad answer, no matter how bad it is, instead of flagging it. I believe that there's a system to evaluate the questions and answers in place that works very well, and thus I prefer to use that as opposed to spam the mods.

This answer in particular showed up to a quite old question, that had already a good accepted answer. Of course, there's always room for improvement, so that would not be an issue, if it wasn't that the new answer was pretty bad (in fact, it did not address the issue at all). Still, I would have downvoted that answer and continue, but the user was a 1-rep unregistered user, so he/she will probably not care about that downvote.

I ended up downvoting and flagging the answer, but instead I used the small textbox to explain this (in a much shorter version), instead of using the canned "very low quality" option.

I don't know about the user, but the question was stinking quite a bit. The problem is that I find quite blurry the limit between a bad answer that should be just downvoted and one that should be removed.

I did not post the link to the question because I would like to read your opinion about those limits, not about that question in particular.

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Some of the specific questions I have:

1. When an answer is bad enough to deserve a downvote and when it should just be flagged?
2. Is it relevant for your decision if there are a few previous good answers to that question?
3. Do you consider the user's history to decide between the above actions?
4. Are you more prone to flag an answer from an unregistered user (who might not ever come back to the question, or even to the site)?
5. In case of flagging, do you feel that you need to explain the flag or you're so sure about it that you just click the "very low quality" option?

Answer 1

If you use the 'Very Low Quality' flag, you're sending a signal to moderators that the delete button probably needs to be pushed. You're telling us that:

• The post is an indecipherable mess and can't be salvaged in the amount of time we're prepared to ask our users to spend editing a single post. This could be due to the post being written in a way that it can't be understood, or it containing horribly formatted code, or both. Put simply, it would take way more than a reasonable amount of time to straighten it out, put that responsibility back on the person who wrote it while keeping it from distracting others.

• Casting close votes and down votes is simply not enough here.

You should not use it to describe the following, but should be using comments, close votes, downvotes and / or edits instead:

• Questions that can be understood, but don't provide enough detail
• Questions that are sloppy, but contain everything needed and can be easily edited into shape.
• Questions that don't show any research effort
• Questions that are clearly off topic
• Answers that are just wrong or even actively harmful
• Posts that are blatant SPAM or trolling (use SPAM/Offensive instead)
• Posts that you simply don't like, for whatever reason

Please keep in mind that moderators are extremely strict when it comes to handling quality related flags. If you vote to close a question that doesn't show any code and flag it as very low quality, a moderator is very likely to decline your flag as lacking evidence prior to closing the question anyway. The signal you should receive from this is yes, this question should be closed, but speedy deletion was not warranted here.

If after reading this you feel that you should not normally use this flag, then you are correct. It's there as a handler for when something is so bad that nothing else fits. If a really horrible post locks eyes with you and you feel its cold, but amazingly strong hands pulling you down into the abyss, 'very low quality' is the napalm grenade you throw to save the rest of us from your fate.

When something is of poor quality but salvageable, use the flag or close reason that mostly describes what's wrong with the post instead. It helps us because the community can better shoulder whatever action needs to be taken, and the person that wrote the post learns something other than it's gone.

Answer 2

I am not sure I have ever used "low quality" but here is where I would. You see a string of words and code labelled answer and they do not answer the question. They say "you could google that" or "I think there's a class in the .NET Framework for that" or "I know that's easy on iPhone so I'm sure you can do it on Android too, try searching the documentation." You want to flag "not an answer" but something stays your hand. Technically, it's kind of an answer. It's a really crummy attempt at an answer and it doesn't answer the question, but at least it's not "thanks!" or "I have the same problem" or "I tried that but it still doesn't work". It's VLQ.

Answer 3

Ask yourself this:

Would you be embarrassed to be associated with this post if it had your name on it?

To me that is the essence of Very Low Quality. Not just bad but embarrassingly bad.