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I was really surprised with the way Stack Overflow question One pickerview with multiple textfields was answered. One user had posted two answers (this and this) instead of using the "Edit" option on any one of the posts. The most surprising thing is the upvotes. The answers posted by the user got three upvotes for both of the answers. Is this the correct way of using the answering mechanism?
Please provide your thoughts.
Based on my personal opinion, surely it's down to the community to judge via the voting system whether or not a answer is worth rewarding. So regardless, if someone has two answers or three people, the community can see this and should be using the voting system to either upvote answers or downvote them.
Of course, the ideal route would be to edit the questions, but people can be sent a message by the community using the downvotes on answers they feel are not useful. If you think both answer the same thing then simply downvote the one you think is of lesser quality. People doing this will soon learn with the amount of downvotes they have.
Yes, the same user can post multiple answers to the question.
If both answers are good answers to the question, why does it matter who posted them?
I have posted two answers to a question on Travel. It was two completely different approaches to something and I wanted people to be able to vote on them independently. Sometimes I'll see a two-part answer and I'll want to vote the first part up and the second part down. That happens on Meta, too. I could see it being reasonable on Programmers (algorithm or architecture approaches), Workplace, Great Outdoors, and plenty of other places that are not quite as cut-and-dried as the typical SO question. But even on SO if someone asks how to do something that can be done two ways, you could add one answer that lists both with their pros and cons, or two short answers and let other people comment the pros and cons and show with voting which the community prefers.
Is a side effect of writing two answers that you could end up with twice the rep you might have? I guess. Rep isn't really fair anyway so I don't worry about that too much.
Answering more than once is allowed and possible, but in many cases that is a sign the question is too broad or bordering on not constructive. Making multiple focused related (but not duplicate) questions is preferable to one general question where multiple answers by the same person would make sense. There are very few instances where multiple answers would be acceptable.
