Is flagging good for answers that don't add any value? [duplicate]

Question

I often see late answer to some post which already has decent number of votes which has accepted answer, and these new answers (mostly by new users) don't any any value and just eat the screen-space + the precious memory of SE hosting + the money + the maintenance cost + time of the user coming/reading the post in future (most important for me).

I thought flagging these for deletion should be good. But, I am not sure what should be the right course of action. What do the meta users have to say about these? Your views?

Answer 1

If you feel that an answer is not useful you can provide that feedback by voting on the post. You can also comment if you would like.

You should not be flagging a post just because you feel that it's not a useful answer.

Answer 2

Maybe everybody agrees that answers that add nothing should be deleted. The problem however is with the "add nothing" bit. People differ about where the bar lies between something and nothing.

On the one hand there is this feature request that comes from a moderator on SO. The feature would be (in brief) to add a way to vote to delete an answer as a duplicate of an earlier one on the same question.

On the other hand, when I've flagged answers as duplicates of earlier ones on SO, I've rarely been able to get the desired results. Maybe I did not make enough of a case for it, or the moderator who handled the flag placed the bar between something and nothing somewhere else than I do, which is likely. The closest the duplicate answer is to be a cut-and-paste of an earlier answer with minor modifications (yes, some folks do this), the greater the chances of success. And there has to be a significant time difference between the time the answers were posted. Simple problems don't have very many significantly different solutions, combined with the Fastest Gun in the West phenomenon you get a bunch of similar answers posted in a short time span. This cannot be helped.

In the meantime, you can downvote, which is unlikely to do much in the grand scheme of things (even with a comment), as the mass of users (on SO at least) tends to upvote anything which is not untrue, irrespective of whether or not it is adding anything to the earlier answers, pertains to the question, etc.

Answer 3

Flagging is a bad idea if the answer:

• answers the question and
• isn't jibberish, spam or crap.

Just being 'low quality' (note: not 'very low quality' as in the definition of the second bullet), isn't a reason to flag.

It might be a reason for you to downvote. Also the late answer queue has some people in place to check if the quality is decent enough. I often see they also judge the answer on the quality relative to the other answers (whether this is good or not).

Also, privileged users can protect a question. This prevents it from attracting more low quality answers.

Answer 4

Stack Exchange is designed to deal with low-quality answers without moderator intervention. The screen space these answers eat up is at the bottom of the page. Downvote them to make sure they stay anchored there. There's just not enough moderator bandwidth in the world to deal with every answer that adds no value.