Do answers that attract both positive and negative votes benefit the community?

Question

I gave this answer to a question. It rapidly attracted a significant number of negative votes and negative comments, to the point where my first reaction was to delete the answer. I could improve it of course, and I did make some effort.

What surprised me is that despite getting so many negatives, I also seem to be getting a number of positives, to the point where my net reputation on this answer is +66. Deleting the answer would be a net loss.

So, what should one do in a case like this? Improve the answer? Answer the detractors? Delete the answer? It largely depends on whether an answer like this is a benefit, on balance. And that's hard for me to assess.

[BTW it would be easier to track what's going on if I could see the votes individually.]

Answer 1

I think they do provide interesting, possibly helpful information. I actually found myself in a similar situation at very low scale (+1+1-1-1-1-1+1), had the same impulse but decided that if people hesitate about it, it might still have some merit.

This is one reason I started this other thread (Debatable questions/answers, public insight on vote counts), even though any possible future feature would probably not address few-vote-counts like my example.

Especially since I have the feeling negative votes encourage you to improve your answer, but sometimes people are so prone and fast at down-voting you and commenting you that you find yourself in a rush to explain yourself and it does feel somewhat overwhelming and discouraging more than anything.

I personally ask for clarification before even considering a down-vote but I often feel like not too many people do that.

Answer 2

It isn't actually a good question. It's based on a student misunderstanding the professor. I don't believe any professor would recommend not freeing the memory allocated by the program. They probably say not to use malloc/free to allocate very small blocks of memory.

Your answer could be understood as advocating for not using free and all, while malloc'ing normally (which is absurd) or using VM with garbage collector (which doesn't address a question) or just a try to add your 2 cents to hot network question (which some consider a deadly sin per se). Or you were just downloaded for the question someone thought doesn't deserve such attention.

Generally such voting pattern on non-meta post means, someone is wrong here. Either upvoters, or downvoters, or the post itself doesn't belong there (meta, opinion-based, flame warfare etc.).

Because the question has one really good answer, it's unlikely to be answered and what can you do is to edit your answer to make clear what you mean. I suppose, you are opting for reusing the blocks of memory if possible? If so, bold it.