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It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down
by manquer 5y ago
It is likely I may know enough to judge a proposed solution is wrong or inadequate etc but not enough to write a better one. Vast majority of users who can down-vote would come under this category.
Encouraging them to write their own solution or even a critique/comment is not necessarily better.
You can also down vote questions not only answers, a question could be poor but it does not mean I can come up with a better one.
- notreallyserio 5y agoIMO it's perfectly acceptable to not only not downvote but to ignore a question or answer if you don't know/don't want to put in more effort to figure it out. Maybe someone else has faced the problem and understands how the questioner came to write the question they did?
- manquer 5y agoMany times it is not hard to figure out why the question was written in a bad way. Spending time in the review queue can give a good sense on bad types of content that are typical on the site. Common issues I come across are very vague statements without an actual question, very broad advisory /opinionated questions, very specific solve this bug in my day job/code , no examples/illustrations added, or a big log or code dump - i.e. no effort to separate out the actual problem statement, do my homework kind of questions, typically there will already be comments asking for improvements without much impact. I wouldn't down-vote a question that I don't fully understand ( I guess that is true for most users too), at the same time I want to make sure bad content is not encouraged. It is just internet points for both users, nothing to fret about.