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Out of curiosity, I just wanted to know: What is the reason that we can't delete more than five answers of our own in a day?

I am aware of the fact that this is a feature of Stack Overflow, but is there any specific reason for such a restriction as I am just trying to delete my own answers, not anyone else's, so shouldn't I have the authority to do so?

I get the point which Mysticial mentioned in comments, but what about the users who have a large number of reputation points, say more than 10k or may be 5k?

Ok I got the point that it is to restrict the rage quitters to delete there good quality answers. But why it is set to 5? As even then also any rage quitter can delete his standard good quality answer also!(Sorry if that is too obvious)

My curiosity becomes more after watching the some good answers(Score of 255) getting detete from this question:- Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array?

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    Apart from the exact "why", you might want to avoid that in any case. Depending on your participation, answer-bans could possibly kick in. Though I wouldn't think you'll easily hit that limit.
    – Bart
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:10
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    To prevent rage-quitters from deleting all their content.
    – Mysticial
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:10
  • Rage quitters aren't limited to people with low rep...
    – Dave Chen
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:14
  • Related:meta.stackexchange.com/questions/164899/…
    – Lance Roberts
    Oct 27, 2013 at 19:57

1 Answer 1

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To prevent rage-quitters from deleting all of their content. It's a lot easier to restore 5 deleted answers than it is to restore 100. High-reputation users have been known to ragequit, and their content is typically high-quality.

Keep in mind the CC:Wiki license that subscribers agree to when they post content. It licenses contributions to the SE community, and that license cannot be revoked.

If a users wants to ragequit, they can ask for their account to be deleted or ask that some content be disassociated from their name, but they can't take their contributions with them.

It's worth noting that the answer you linked that was deleted has thirteen moderator flags on it, and the question it answers has 300 thousand views. The number of votes on any given post tend to track proportionally with the number of views, so the number of votes that an answer attracts is not always representative of the answer's quality.

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  • To be strictly accurate isn't it licenced irrevokably to the community. The difference being I can reuse my own content however I see fit
    – Richard Tingle
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:17
  • Yes, that's right.
    – user102937
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:17
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    Or rather, that the owner has given the community irrevocable permission to use, copy & modify those contributions. See also: the Subscriber Content section of the network terms of service.
    – Shog9
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:18
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    Got that!. I am really sorry about that. I was just curious to know that. I should have read the things before asking. Thanks a lot!
    – Rahul Tripathi
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:22
  • @RobertHarvey:- I was actually looking for the same thing which was answered in the similar question which is marked:- But you're right that it ideally should not prevent you from cleaning up your substandard answers.
    – Rahul Tripathi
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:27
  • You just have to do the cleanup five at a time, that's all. Hopefully you don't have that many answers to clean up.
    – user102937
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:31
  • @RobertHarvey:- Yes I got that very clear. I just wanted to know why it is set to 5? Any special reason or just as any reason? Sorry if I am missing some obvious? Because even the good answers can be deleted then also by the rage quitters!
    – Rahul Tripathi
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:33
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    @Rahul They picked a number; that number was 5. 5 is a good number. I like 5. (a.k.a. it was probably an arbitrary decision; "hey we should probably rate-limit answer deletions." "sure, how about 5 a day?" "sure, five sounds good")
    – user206222
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:41
  • @Emrakul:- Are you serious? I think the SO community thinks about everything before implementing. But if you say so it may be but really hard to believe:)
    – Rahul Tripathi
    Oct 27, 2013 at 18:42
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    @RahulTripathi: When SE wrote this function, the die returned an output of 5.
    – user102937
    Oct 27, 2013 at 20:10

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