How can we treat equally two answers giving the same advice when one was flagged as LQP?

Question

I just ran through this answer in the review queue. It was flagged as Low Quality.

It gives this advice: "Shopping in LGBT-friendly stores [...] has the added benefit of potentially catering directly to your purposes."

What bothers me is that the second top-rated answer says more or less the same thing. And that no one said anything or saw something wrong about it. Or I missed a point somewhere in those answers, if so, please feel free to let me know :)

My points are: Should we also flag the answer that was not flagged? Or ignore it? Or ignore the LQP flag? How could the 2 answers be treated equally if they are not?

Answer 1

I reviewed that as well. I took this into account:

• It doesn't address the question (How to deflect), only gives advice on how to avoid.
• It has no Interpersonal aspect to it
• The 'other' answer was also flagged. It's review is 'completed'. It has since been edited as well.

Should we also flag the answer that was not flagged? Or ignore it? Or ignore the LQP flag? How could the 2 answers be treated equally if they are not?

• Don't ignore the LQP flag. Another reason to flag LQP is that this answer is almost a duplicate of the first, written 3/4 hours later. It doesn't take that long to write so little.

• These answers aren't 'equal' --> The answer in your LQP review queue was written later than the 'original'. Although both are bad, the second could be treated as a duplicate of the first, and such answers shouldn't be around anyway. In case of two answers that are very similar, the second one can be deleted without arguing whether the first one was good or not.

• The answer was flagged. But, if it weren't edited, it would have fallen into the categories of answers mentioned here and here. The community decided on meta that such answers aren't welcome here.

Take a good look at both of these aforementioned meta topics. Really, do it. The general agreement there is that answers that don't answer/address the question, aren't good answers. Both also mention the argument that it may be due to the question, but in my opinion, that doesn't really count here. The OP is specifically asking to deflect questions, not avoid them, so I don't know what's unclear about that. If you want to answer and say something else, at least argue why deflecting isn't feasible.

---

Personally, I flagged the 'other' answer yesterday with a custom flag for moderator attention. Due to the number of upvotes it had, I wasn't confident it would get 'discarded' in the review queue:

This answer isn't really an answer to the question of 'How to deflect'. It also isn't written as a frame-challenge and the OP isn't willing to make it one (see comments). Take a look at this interpersonal.stackexchange.com/a/6177/1599, which shows a lot more effort, takes the actual question into account and offers a frame challenge. I think this should be deleted, the question has reached HNQ and other users will be seeing this answer and think it okay to write even worse/shorter ones – Tinkeringbell 16 hours ago pending

I did so based on the information I gathered from meta about what kind of answers we were expecting, and the stance of the community I found there. The discussion about answer quality had recently flared up again, and I took myself to meta to educate myself about what kind of answers are expected here on IPS. With that in the back of my mind, I saw that this answer in its original form didn't meet the expectations I saw written down on meta and agreed upon by the community.

I have since retracted the flag because the OP grudgingly edited their answer to include some rectification as to why they thought deflecting the awkward questions wasn't possible here.

---

If there are two answers that are 'equal' and the oldest one is a good answer, and there has been significant time (say more than 1 hour?) between the writing of the two, the second one is a low-quality answer and can be deleted.

If both answers fail to meet the expectations for a good answer that the community has written down on meta, both should be downvoted, a comment should be left for the OP explaining what is expected of a good answer, and both should be flagged as well. Just as we put questions on-hold to allow an OP to edit them, so can we delete answers that don't meet our expectations and give the OP a chance to edit them before we undelete them.

Answer 2

I'm going to take another one of my unpopular stands here. I think both answers are more or less ok.

Granted the second top rated answer could use some fleshing out. A secondary "if this isn't an option where you live, or how one might locate and identify such shops" would be nice, but I think it offered a relevant, helpful, albeit indirect answer to the problem.

The second similar answer was similarly a relevant, helpful, albeit indirect answer to the problem, but it did expand on some other relevant advantages of using the proposed solution.

I think we should try to evaluate whether the answer posted is going to be helpful for the OP and whether it's going to be potentially helpful for future readers when we're thinking about flagging things for deletion. Sometimes the indirect answer is going to be really very helpful, and we are doing people a disservice by deleting them.

If you don't like indirect answers, you're always free to vote your conscience, but please don't flag or vote to delete useful content.

Answer 3

May I suggest that neither answer needs to be deleted. Low quality post usually means a very short answer which does not give any explanation for the advice offered. These answers are not that.

One of them says that a special shop will be more welcoming and the other says there will be a much better range of good fitting options for men.

The main defect of both answers would seem to be that the basic premise of the suggestion offered (whatever be its merits) significantly narrows OP's range of options far beyond what was originally framed in the question by OP, who could easily have said "this was not the type of advice I asked for" in both cases, even though he didn't say that. In that sense there is no real reason to delete one answer and keep the other. Delete both answers or delete neither!

But if we are to now become so strict about quality of answers and demand exact relevance to OP's frame of reference then a lot of other answers on this site (even a few early ones of mine) might be flagged as low quality for the sake of consistency.

If you are willing to do that, then either moderators or delete-voting enabled members should also be willing to objectively and consistently delete such answers, even if some have accumulated a good number of upvotes.

I don't particularly like either of these answers but in the interests of fairness and consistency (which was the main point of this question) we cannot delete them in isolation without deleting a large number of answers on IPS that either ignored OP's frame of reference or failed to fully explain why the advice would be a good solution for OP. That is really a policy matter needing community consensus on meta. Meanwhile if users do not approve of the quality let them downvote.

In general Stack Exchange websites consider that a poor answer need not be deleted, just downvoted so that they 'sink' to the bottom of the page while the best answers are upvoted and 'rise' to the top. I think these 2 are just mediocre or poor answers, not 'very low quality answers.' So I will downvote both and any member who thinks these are 'very low quality answers' can either flag or vote to delete.

If only the later answer gets deleted and the earlier one remains visible then users can assume that neither answer had an issue of quality and the later was simply deleted as a duplicate of the earlier answer.