Revision d06995f0-8ad5-4705-a9ff-7967bc46a4cb - Software Engineering Meta Stack Exchange
For few recent months, I've got a habit of downvoting answers which quality doesn't look OK to me.
> 
These probably can be generally described as low effort and/or these lacking relevance to question asked.
* <sup>Opinionated slogans, claims that are not backed up by appropriate references or by compelling presentation of personal experience, posts that appear to ignore prior answers covering same grounds, stuff like that...</sup>
As far as I can tell, many (probably most) of my downvotes go to answers in ["hot questions"](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/hot-questions/info "what's this").
While I downvote maybe one of the answers to 5-10 "regular" questions, I noticed that almost every question with [views over 2K](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=views%3a2000%20closed%3a0) brings answers that look bad to me.
**"Hot garbage waves"** in the answers appear to happen once or twice a week on average, frequent enough to feel the connection between these and respective questions making their way into [SE collider list](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/stackexchange-button/info "what's this").
Is that something to worry about?
---
My particular concern is the poisonous effect these mis-answers have on questions, making **interesting and well presented problems** look the same as non-constructive [popularity contests](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popularity/).
* <sub>"Oh look: ['my guess is fairly prosaic. Git is brilliant...'](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/177890/31260 "example") - with upvoted answer like that it [can't be a real question](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/not-a-real-question/info "not-a-real-question - what's this?")".</sub>
What is especially depressing is that regular ways to deal with this kind of issues just don't work. It's typically not difficult to edit the question to [repel garbage answers](http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/a/3835/31260 "as discussed eg here"), I can easily name a handful of active regulars who [can and do](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/users?tab=editors&filter=all "our editors gang is pretty strong") just that.
Thing is though, it takes some time to figure how to clean up ambiguous wording while preserving the essence of original. In regular questions this works like a charm, but when editing a hot one, I often find out that when I'm done with edit, someone already posted an answer that [invalidates my edit](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/144787/165773 "more on that here"). And answer that exploits another minor ambiguity. And yet another, and so on, until my brain explodes!
* <sup>It feels like all one gets is just like 60 seconds to figure protective edit to cover every word and letter in the question that could possibly be misinterpreted by some random passer-by and exploited for their senseless cheap shots. That's just... impossible. And more, it feels quite unfair to over-police text of such questions: per my observations "hotness algorithm" have been smart enough to pick questions that have reasonably good wording as-is.</sup>
The way how things work now helps to attract new contributors but I would appreciate if achieving this important goal <sup>**[1](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/02/when-is-an-account-abandoned/ "'reduce the friction of... answering to little more than entering an anonymous comment on a blog'"), [2](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/04/helping-the-experts-get-answers/ "'attract notable experts to your site'"), [3](http://stackexchange.com/about "'free and open to everyone... answer questions without even bothering to register'")**</sup> would somehow be less damaging **<sup>[4](http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html "'protect your own users from scale ...human interaction, many to many interaction, doesn't blow up like a balloon...'")</sup>** for good, highly visible questions.
##Background
For a little data to back up what was written above, I quickly went through few [sampled](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/181999/31260 "random sampling, stuff like that") questions with more than 10K views asked for last half year.
Please bear in mind that below list only **partially** represents the issue: it would be hard to do similar walkthrough for questions with [over 2K views](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=views%3a2000%20closed%3a0) since these appear about **10x** more frequently.
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/156722/how-does-learning-assembly-aid-in-programming
20 answers total, I'd downvote about 7-8
<sub>Of 5 answers scored 10 or above, 3-4 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/158640/why-cant-the-it-industry-deliver-large-faultless-projects-quickly-as-in-other
[protected](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/protected-questions/info "what's this"), 27 answers, I'd downvote about 12-13
<sub>Of 7 answers scored 10 or above, all look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159637/what-is-the-mars-curiosity-rovers-software-built-in
protected, 2 answers, all look OK
<sub>Both answers are scored above 10 (way above:).</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/159813/do-i-need-to-use-an-interface-when-only-one-class-will-ever-implement-it
13 answers, I'd downvote about 6-8
<sub>Of 4 answers scored 10 or above, 3-4 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/161794/is-it-a-good-idea-to-design-an-architecture-thinking-that-the-user-interface-cla
17 answers, I'd downvote about 8-9
<sub>Of 5 answers scored 10 or above, 3-4 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/162643/why-is-clean-code-suggesting-avoiding-protected-variables
12 answers, I'd downvote about 6-7
<sub>Of 3 answers scored 10 or above, all look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/163185/torvalds-quote-about-good-programmer
17 answers, I'd downvote about 7-8
<sub>Of 5 answers scored 10 or above, 3-4 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/165380/how-can-i-really-master-a-programming-language
protected, 14 answers, I'd downvote about 8-9
<sub>Of 3 answers scored 10 or above, 2-3 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/167305/what-functionality-does-dynamic-typing-allow
protected by [mod notice](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/post-notice/info "what's this"), 16 answers, I'd downvote about 8-9
<sub>Of 4 answers scored 10 or above, all look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/168751/is-the-use-of-utf8-preferable-to-utf8-true
protected, 3 answers, I'd downvote 2 (especially the one where author didn't even bother to format their code, `<meta charset="URF-8">`)
<sub>The only answer scored above 10 is one that looks OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/173441/what-triggered-the-popularity-of-lambda-functions-in-modern-mainstream-programmi
12 answers, I'd downvote 2-4
<sub>Of 5 answers scored 10 or above, all look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/176113/does-having-a-higher-paid-technical-job-mean-you-do-not-get-to-code-any-more
protected, 4 answers, I'd downvote 1-2
<sub>There's only one answer scored 10 or above; it looks OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/176582/is-there-an-excuse-for-short-variable-names
protected, 16 answers, I'd downvote about 8-9
<sub>Of 4 answers scored 10 or above, all look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/177875/why-is-the-sudden-increase-in-number-of-git-submitters-on-debian-popcon-graph-in
protected, 11 answers, I'd downvote about 6-7
<sub>Of 4 answers scored 10 or above, 2 look OK to me.</sub>
* http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/180948/why-arent-user-defined-operators-more-common
12 answers, I'd downvote about 4-6
<sub>Of 5 answers scored 10 or above, 4 look OK to me.</sub>
URL used to get above questions is:
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=views%3a10000%20closed%3a0
<sub>Note I wrote "I'd downvote" above since I did not really do that to all the answers I checked because of [voting limits](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/tags/voting-limits/info).</sub>