Long answers on stackoverflow [closed]

Question

Do we want long comprehensive answers to questions on stackoverflow?

Is it better to spend 30 secs to write "look this up [insert link here]", or do we want people to take their time (maybe an hour! maybe more!) to write a more comprehensive and detailed answer?

I've seen people make comments like these on highly voted short answers:

• "+1; this is why i love stackoverflow! answers are short and to the point!"
• "+1; beat me to it!" (because it's all about quickness?)

And some of my long answers have been:

• Downvoted (Was it too long? All pole and no fish? Was there a minor technical mistake somewhere? Too many quotes from references and/or books and not enough original material? Was the answer not entertaining enough because it's all business and no personality, since I refrain from making jokes, using smilies, or injecting personal opinions/anecdotes?)
• Commented with "who has the time to read this???" etc
• Unrewarded with regards to votes

I've only been on stackoverflow for a few months, so I'm still trying to figure out what kind of answers the community wants (as evidenced by their votes), what kind of answers the owners want (as laid out in their vision), and what kind of answers I want (yes, I can have my own vision too!), and how best to reconcile the differences that may exist between them, so any guidance is appreciated.

Answer 1

There is nothing inherently good or bad about the specific length of an answer. SO is not about simply finding short answers, nor is it about finding comprehensive, encyclopedic descriptions of everything under the sun. At the risk of stating the obvious, the point of SO is to relate a question to an answer. Provide as much--or at little--information as is necessary to answer the question adequately and completely.

To the point, the answer that you linked to presents a mountain of information that, frankly, seems a bit irrelevant to the question at hand. Not only does it dive deeper than the questioner probably wanted (and might just confuse him), it even delves into areas that are entirely unrelated, like the unordered nature of NaN values. The user wasn't asking about the nature of numeric representation in memory, he just asked why an exception was thrown when he used an integral type but not a floating-point type. Telling him that floating-point types have a way to represent infinity and integral types do not would have probably been sufficient.

Answer 2

If you find yourself writing a novel as an answer to a question, you are very likely:

• Digressing
• Answering a very difficult question
• Answering a really bad question

I'd be willing to venture, in most cases, you are dealing with item 1 or item 3. There are some questions that are actually four or even five questions lumped under the umbrella of a single problem. Or, perhaps the question was overly broad, and you tried to answer it anyway, addressing all possible cases.

In a perfect world, a down vote only indicates that something is technically wrong with your answer. However, yes, it sometimes is an artifact of someone simply not able to endure the suspense of reading your answer any longer.

If I can't answer something with a few well formed paragraphs and a couple of code snippets, I generally just pass on answering the question.

Answer 3

I've taken to using the pattern:

short answer: you're going to need to use libfoo

slightly longer answer: by linking to libfoo and taking advantage of the barexing function you can accomplish something close enough to what you want and won't notice the difference. Doing *exactly what you asked for is hard because the quix parsing is ill equipped for it.

long answer: [a wall of grey text laying out the works]

This has the advantage that the short, formatted bit at the top allows rapid scanning, so people will know if they might want to read the long bit.

Also, you can build the entry incrementally to deal with the FGITW issues. Especially you can build the long part incrementally.

Answer 4

This question really puzzles me. You made over 37,000 arbitrary points in five months and you have to ask here, what is the best way to answer questions?

Well, then, the short version:
You are writing too much. Even looking at the comments here, you type much more than is necessary to make a concise point. But the people like your SO answers (look at your rep), so what?

SO started as being the reference for every possible coding question. If a question is only answered with a link, which is very likely to be rotten in a few month, then your type of detailed answering is superior.

When all what you write, is already said on Wikipedia, then keep it there. It's much more likely that SO is vanished in 5 years, than Wikipedia.

Answer 5

Do we want long comprehensive answers to questions on stackoverflow?

I doubt it. Who would want such a thing? Comprehensive answers are great - but given the choice between a long comprehensive answer and a succinct comprehensive answer, all else being equal the shorter one will win just because more people will read it.

You may think you're being extra-comprehensive by including detailed discussions of tangential matters, but unless those discussions are relevant to someone looking to solve the problem, you're just wasting time...

But why are you worried about this anyway? If you enjoy writing long, detailed answers with numerous detours into related topics, then make yourself happy. Above all else, you should enjoy the writing you do on SO. If writing shorter answers would take that away from you, then maybe think about ways to make your lengthy scribblings more accessible or entertaining to the casual reader... But don't stress about it; SO's readers will take care of elevating the answers that they enjoy - but only you can ensure that you enjoy writing answers.

Answer 6

While I appreciate both types of answers (within reason), if a short, quick answer provides enough information to solve my problem right away, I prefer it over a longer, more complete answer that comes hours later. I may upvote them both but unless the longer answer does more to solve my problem I'm likely to reward the shorter answer with the acceptance. I may comment that the longer answer does a better job with the explanation, but I think the reward should go to the answer that actually helped solve my problem.

When searching for information on other's questions, I'm likely to do the exact opposite. In that case I vote for the best answer, regardless of acceptance status. I may upvote several comparable answers or only the best if there is a significant difference in quality.

In my mind, when asking my own question, getting an answer that unblocks me quickly is preferable to waiting several hours or even minutes before I can get back to my work. Of course, both short, quick and long, slow answers that are incomplete or wrong are equally bad. I certainly prefer a correct answer over any incorrect answer no matter how long it takes.

When answering, the strategy I (and presumably others) use is to give a quick, correct answer, then follow it up immediately with an edit that expands on it if necessary. Usually this involves adding references and examples, but it could also add corner cases or caveats. I've even gone back and edited answers to improve them weeks or months later as I get new information or become aware of something I've missed (usu. through someone else's comment).

Little of this applies on meta, though.

Answer 7

You should aim to have as much of your answer as possible directly relevant to the question. If you have more information that's tangentially related I think the best form is to provide links to external resources that have that additional information, or to mention the related topics in passing and encourage people to ask new questions on those topics if necessary. We want clear, accurate answers to clear, topical questions. Long isn't worse, but we're not here to write encyclopedia articles either.