Why reward an answer to a low quality question?

Question

Consider a question like this How to concatenate echos.

A great deal of the questions nowadays seems to be questions which could be solvable by spending five to ten minutes reading a decent tutorial or a manual. I've noticed that many experienced Stackoverflowers just adds these easy solutions as comments. However, there seems very often to be a reputation lurk hiding behind the corner rushing to reward these questions with a one-lined accepted answer as soon as the question has been asked.

Isn't this situation quite absurd because both the asker and the one answering the question benefits from it without making any real effort towards it whatsoever. This encourages users to think that no matter what kind of questions they ask, they'll get an answer to it and while people in the hope of some easy rep keeps answering them, the vicious circle is ready.

Maybe the reputation gathered from an accepted answer and votes could be annulled if the question gets a certain amount of downvotes?

Answer 1

This is a known issue with trivial questions and answers where people are quick to answer easy questions and the most obvious answers are quickly upvoted. Because there are more people who understand trivial answers than difficult ones, these answers are more likely to get upvoted and the harder ones often go unnoticed. And the people who answer first are likely to get upvoted.

I would tend to answer these type of questions in the following ways:

• putting them in the comments (as you said)
• writing a Community Wiki answer

I have encountered a trivial question on how to link an image and I knew that people were going to upvote trivial answers. I don't feel like getting reputation for that so I made my answer a Community Wiki post.

Making this an automated process would be difficult since there could be bad questions with exceptional answers that deserve the reputation they get. But it would be nice to persuade people to convert their trivial answers into Community Wiki.

Answer 2

A great deal of the questions nowadays seems to be questions which could be solvable by spending five to ten minutes reading a decent tutorial or a manual.

This isn't exactly new... Go look back at the questions being asked in the fall of '08 - yeah, there were some real head-scratchers, but there were a lot of really trivial "how do I call function() to do task?" questions too.

Beyond that, 5-10 minutes is a long time compared to what it takes to search Google. Donno about this question specifically, but I've both benefited from and contributed to questions where the answer can be found rather easily in the manual - but which is needed so rarely as to make it difficult to remember from one occasion of need to the next.

So what's the harm? Are you really gonna begrudge me the answer to a simple question that I have need of only three times a year? Do you never google trivial facts that are simply not something you have need to remember and use daily?