Timeline for Why do most users, including experienced ones, keep commenting instead of answering?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 8, 2016 at 19:57 | comment | added | Andrea Lazzarotto | @DenisNardin, we may have different opinions about quality standards, however if your contribution is correct and it answers the question, I believe it should be an answer (not a comment). | |
| May 8, 2016 at 14:25 | comment | added | Denis Nardin Mod | I often write my opinion in comments when I don't think they are good enough to be an answer. My usage habits come from the site where I'm most active (mathoverflow) and there the standard for answers is high indeed. | |
| May 8, 2016 at 8:54 | comment | added | Charo Mod | @AndreaLazzarotto: I think you can find a similar behaviour in other SE sites, at least in the scientific ones. For instance, have a look at these Physics.SE questions: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/246932/…, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/245094/…. You can say that they have answers in the comments written by experienced users. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 18:07 | comment | added | Andrea Lazzarotto | @Charo The problem I was trying to outline is that there are less posted answer than there should be, since many are buried in the comments. I was not suggesting to prevent answers, quite the opposite. I believed that the rules were similar to other sites on the network, it seems I was wrong and IT.SE is kind of a different universe. I will keep that in mind from now on. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 18:04 | comment | added | Charo Mod | @AndreaLazzarotto: I think they do that for the reason explained in my first comment. In my opinion, if we really try to stop that, we risk to decrease the quality of the answers posted in this site, so I wouldn't do nothing to stop that. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 17:10 | comment | added | Andrea Lazzarotto | @Charo I will do it, thanks. That is a temporary workaround, although my two primary questions remain open: why do they do that and how do we stop doing that. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 16:27 | comment | added | Charo Mod | @AndreaLazzarotto: If you really believe it's that way, I think you should follow the suggestion of egreg's comment. See, for instance, what happened here. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 15:26 | comment | added | Andrea Lazzarotto | The problem is that, in many cases, the comments I am referring to contain full featured answers and there is no reason why they are posted as comments. Especially since they get never converted to answers later on. As per the rules, comments should be used to ask clarifications or provide "non-answering" information. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 14:13 | comment | added | Charo Mod | So, I wouldn't discourage this behaviour, but I think we should spur on writing an answer once the discussion has generated enough details. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 14:04 | comment | added | Charo Mod | Nevertheless, this kind of comments often give rise to very interesting discussions about the question, which sometimes end up with very good answers. I mean that, thanks to the discussion generated by the comments, one ends up writing a very good answer, otherwise the answers would be poorer. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 13:54 | history | edited | DaG | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1 character in body
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| May 7, 2016 at 13:53 | comment | added | Charo Mod | I agree with you. In my opinion, high reputation users here seek to have a site of very high quality. For this reason, they post comments instead of answers when they feel that it is something incomplete, that it doesn't give enough details, it is not based on good sources or that they are only expressing their own experience or their own opinion. | |
| May 7, 2016 at 13:02 | history | answered | DaG | CC BY-SA 3.0 |