Is it "breaking the rules" to downvote trivial answers?

Question

I came across this answer earlier today, which I deemed trivial (all it gave was the solution, not an explanation of why it worked or how to prevent this from happening in the future, and was practically copied from the comments above, which were posted about two minutes before).

I left a comment explaining why I downvoted, and a few people took offense to it:

@RichardJ.RossIII You're downvoting an answer that answers the OPs question? – modifiable lvalue

@RichardJ.RossIII habitually violates the rules. Since this answer is not wrong or dangerous and is in fact useful, it should not be downvoted. +1 to compensate. – Jim Balter

My question is, is there a policy against doing this? Should we, as a community, accept and encourage such answers? Personally, I think the whole question should be deleted, as it is far from useful, but that's not the point here.

Generally speaking, I save my upvotes for answers which either helped me personally, or do an exceptional amount towards answering a question. I downvote a lot, as I have high standards (that's not to say that I'm perfect, however).

The bottom line is this: should I be more conservative with my downvoting patterns?

Answer 1

No it isn't. You can downvote for whatever reason you want as long as it isn't targeted at any user.

Different people have different standards and it's perfectly fine to have high standards.

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Some people (myself included) actually have double standards...

• For new and/or low traffic questions, I'll let anything that isn't wrong pass.
• For old and high-traffic questions that are already well-answered, I have very high standards. And I will not hesitate to drop a link in our chatrooms to get the downvotes necessary to delete vote low-quality answers.

Answer 2

No it isn't. Firstly, as mentioned here, voting is subjective and nobody can force you to vote differently.

It is breaking the rules to answer a question that should be closed -- a 1k user really should know better (and so should the 5k user who is berating you for downvoting). The question probably needs deletion.

In such cases, it may be helpful to downvote and comment "please don't answer such questions using the answer box. Instead, flag as and provide an answer in the comments if you wish."

I personally downvote trivial answers as well -- I like answers with at least a sentence of explanation. (But of hypocrisy here -- some of my older answers are quite trivial -- but that's what comes of answering jquery questions :P)

Answer 3

It's not breaking the rules; you are free to vote whichever way you want.

However, downvoting answers to trivial / typo questions isn't really supported by many in the community; as you have observed, it will often end in strife and/or people upvoting to counter your downvote.

A more productive course of action might be voting to close, and then voting to delete, the question once it's been answered.

See also Close all the typo questions

Answer 4

There are no hard rules on this, as long as you vote on posts and not on users, you're free to use your votes as you see fit. Where exactly you draw the line on useful or not useful answers is up to you, though I would recommend to avoid the very extremes. Upvoting everything or never upvoting at all are not very useful voting patterns to the community.

Downvoting answers to questions that should have been closed is not uncommon, though I personally only do that for users that really should know better.