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Some popular good-quality questions on Health.SE have two liners as answers which go something like:

I did it and I’m fine

or

This is not a problem. I’ve never encountered anyone that had these symptoms

or the opposite:

My mother had the cold too and it turned out she suffered from xyloduseroviyustexicouaeasis.

The problem is that the site Health.SE doesn’t work that way. You can’t just give case studies of people as an answer. These answers are “wrong” on Health.SE.

These answers do attempt to answer the question (hence I’m unsure whether to flag them as "not an answer"). Usually, I’d wait for seven downvotes and let the system handle this. However, on a small beta site seven downvotes take forever (and the question will soon disappear from the active-feed).

In the past, I’ve assembled the Avengers1 (a bunch of helpful people on Tavern on Meta) and basically downvoted such answers into oblivion as a group action.

That doesn’t feel right either. What is the recommended procedure in such cases?


1: Or the Justice League, depending on your flavour

1 Answer 1

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Do they attempt to answer the question?

Given your examples that seems not very likely.

First asking help page says this:

inspire answers that explain “why” and “how” & tend to have long, not short, answers

If the questions you had in mind are indeed "good" then these "answers" are not a good fit – not to the question and not to the site.

Do we have standard disclaimer to add to those?

Containing: Low quality answer, too short, anecdotal…?

This "low quality" has to to be made aware for and to newcomers primarily. Are there people coming from search engines, posting answers right away? My guess is less than people reading a little bit of previous content, possibly seeing these bad examples; not elsewhere, but here.

This warning banner should and could be applied much more speedily than all those costly downvotes and flags. Seems to me that this is less of a burden to the mods then.

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