Do I deserve downvoting for answering spoon feeding answers? [duplicate]

Question

I have just answered a question in which the OP has not put any effort.

I did not find any rules here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-answer for downvoting spoon feeding answers. Please tell me what should I do? Should I delete my answer?

Answer 1

The tooltip on the downvote arrow reads:

This answer is not useful

This is the only guideline we have about downvoting (with vote fraud being the only exception).

Obviously, what is and what isn't useful is a matter of opinion. Some people (myself included) tend to think that spoonfeeding answers aren't useful, and they are free to use their downvotes to express that opinion.

Similarly, you are free to use your own interpretation of "useful" to decide if you should delete your answer or not. However, you should also keep in mind that the answer will be deleted if the question is deleted, something that right now seems quite likely (the question is closed, and scored at -10).

Conversely, you might be interested in reading this recent discussion on Meta Programmers: Open letter to students with homework problems. It might help you understand why some of us don't particularly enjoy no effort homework questions & spoonfeeding answers.

Answer 2

Vote are (mostly) up to the users who cast them.

It seems that some people think that discouraging answers to such questions is the only way to stop (or at least reduce the rate of) that type of questions. So they are doing this in an effort to maintain site quality.

On the whole I am one of the people that thinks you have to stop the answer to stop the questions, though I haven't been very active of Stack Overflow recently.

Answer 3

I deal with the question itself first. If it's a possibly salvageable question that the asker can fix with more effort, I comment along those lines to try and help. If it's phrasing, formatting, grammar, or something else that can be edited to fix, I do so.

If the question is beyond salvation, or after a period of time the asker hasn't improved it, I vote to close and (sometimes depending on the question) downvite it.

I frequently leave comments on answers posted to questions that are off-topic, asking the person who answered not to do so because it encourages other off-topic questions.

I also often comment on answers posted to poor or no-effort questions asking the poster not to answer them because it removes any incentive for them to edit and improve it (because they've already gotten it answered) and because, again, it encourages other poor or low-effort questions.

In either case, I usually get a comment back. They typically either are

• From the answerer, who defends their reason for answering anyway (often rather rudely), in which case I downvote to indicate disagreement with their answering the question.
• From the answerer, who says something along the lines of "Sorry. I didn't realize/know that." and removes the answer, in which case there's no need (and nothing to) downvote.

So my position is that I try to teach the person who answered the reasons to avoid answering these types of questions, give them an opportunity first to do something constructive themselves, and then if they choose not to do so I downvote the answer to discourage them from doing so in the future (and almost always leave a comment stating why I'm doing so).