Today I created a query to plot the average answer score by answer length. The results show that:
- really short answers (less than 30 or 40 characters) often score quite well,
- write beyond that and you get about 9 rep for each 1k characters you put into an answer, and
- beyond about 2k characters you enter a realm of high volatility.
What is it about the QA format of Stack Overflow, or the sorts of questions and answers asked here, that 'discourages' longer answers, putting them into the nature of fickle voting?