Is it a good idea to vote to delete an answer after it was accepted by OP?

Question

When you vote to delete an answer after it was accepted by OP, you are basically telling OP

No, you can't accept that answer, even if you already did. You can accept another answer if you feel like.

I wouldn't like that at all if I was the OP, and would consider it very high-handed of the voters if an answer I accepted later got deleted.

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https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/a/1814/381

While I am not exactly proud of this early answer I wrote 4 months ago, OP found it useful and accepted it 2 days ago.

My answer had scored exactly +2 -2 = 0 in 4 months but got heavily downvoted to +5 -14 = -9 today after it was accepted by OP, and it has collected 2 delete votes.

So voters are basically downvoting it because it was accepted by OP. Or else you had 4 months to cast these downvotes.

@Monica Cellio has rightly pointed out in a comment that

I suspect the (new) bounty brought an old question to lots of people's attention, people who hadn't voted before or hadn't seen all the older answers.

In fact downvoting is OK if users don't like an answer but voting to delete: I see it as an attack on OP's choice and I wouldn't like it to happen to any member's answer I accepted to one of my own questions. Why would anybody want to delete an answer that was found helpful and therefore accepted by the person asking the question!

I am not asking why my answer should be downvoted or deleted. Kindly do not waste your time to explain why. It was obviously a just-OK answer (not a good or great answer) till it was accepted by OP.

We are not talking about the answer itself but the fact that it was accepted. The merits of the answer ought to have nothing to do with it once OP has accepted it. It is very much a case of site etiquette and general procedure whether any answer that was accepted by OP should be deleted unless the question itself got deleted.

I lost 22 points (11 downvotes since being accepted) and gained 20 points (2 upvotes) for a negligible net reputation change plus the rare notoriety of having written a greyed-out -9 score answer that was accepted by OP, but I am only asking about the advisability of delete-voting an accepted answer here.

So is it a good idea to vote to delete an answer after it was accepted by OP?

Answer 1

First of all, I don't think this answer should be deleted. But that's not because it's accepted or a very good answer. It's because the question isn't good either.

The title asks "How should I approach a situation in which I made a female roommate uncomfortable?"

While the body asks "How can I let the complainant know I am sorry what I said upset them and meant no ill intentions?"

These are two very different questions, and your answer is a valid answer to the first one. Do nothing (learn for next time) is a valid answer.It's not really a good frame-challenge though (it doesn't point out what can go wrong if you decide to do something), and not up to par with what we're expecting from a good answer right now. But, as you pointed out, it's 4 months old.

I haven't seen a consensus about deleting old, 'bad' answers.

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If such a question would be posted now, we would edit the question title to match the body. Because edits are not supposed to invalidate existing answers, I'm hesitant to say the title should be edited anyway. I think if we want to do that, such a thing deserves it's own meta post discussing the pro's and con's of doing so.

But, like I said, editing the title would invalidate your answer, and that's probably why you're getting down- and delete votes.

Like Monica pointed out, a bounty was placed upon it, putting it under scrutiny of a community that's 4 months further along in defining what it expects from an answer.

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What bothers me though, is that NO-ONE has taken the time or effort to write a comment explaining this to you. A simple 'Hey, I saw this answer now that there's a bounty, and it doesn't really address X,Y, can you improve it?' would probably have done wonders.

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As for deleting answers that are accepted by OP's, I think this is something the community has to decide on a case-by-case basis for now.

In this case, I'd personally do nothing. Your answer answers the first part of the question (the title). It's accepted by the OP, which probably means their real problem was the 'what to do' and not the 'how to apologize'.

Answer 2

I think that answers should be able to be deleted even after being accepted.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing about whether your answer specifically should be deleted or not, or the merits of it.

From what I have seen, this whole network of sites have the goal of community moderated and promoted content. The OP is not the most important person when it comes to the answers. The community is the one who votes answers up and down, and there shouldn't be any one person with the power to override everyone else opinions.

I do think that accepting the answer should count as, say, 5 or 10 votes to keep it open. So this raises the threshold for answer deletion, but retains the possibility.

Answer 3

I, too, think that even an accepted answer should be deletable.

Especially on IPS I noticed some questions where the answer to "How do I X?" (according to many voters) is "Don't X because..." - and where the OP then went on to accept a low-scored answer that explained "How to X". Because they clearly hadn't realised that X is a stupid idea and wanted to go on doing it.

But what's the point of going to an advice site, asking for advice, then ignoring the (most upvoted) advice, going on to do something questionable (that fits their original idea) - and then claiming that this is the best solution (by accepting an answer)? IPS doesn't exist to mitigate the cognitive dissonance of OPs who didn't get a "free pass" from the Internet to do whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

Rather, it should serve as a resource to others who might have the same question - and should be presented with a reasonable answer first. In hopes that they are more reasonable...

Note: My argument isn't geared towards your specific answer - which I don't see as terrible advice. But you said yourself we should not focus on the answer itself.