User answering poor question while also voting to close

Question

Context

Tonight I witnessed conduct from a reputable user that I find outrageous. I won’t name names, but as the individual’s identity could be determined by tracing my activity anyways, I’ll include quotes of his.

Per usual, a new user posted multiple homework questions verbatim and demanded that we help him. And, per usual, a very reputable user seized the low-hanging fruit for a total of 0.11 % rep increase. This is a problem in and of itself for reason 2 below.

What I found especially outrageous though was that this user also voted to close the question! It was, of course, eventually closed. But his answer still stands as the one with the $\color{green}{\checkmark}$. He went on to acknowledge his actions before I even saw the post:

this is one of the questions which is interesting but the asker is just posting problem statement. And then I give an answer as well as a close vote to the question.

I addressed this in the comments:

That’s outrageous! I appreciate your contributions to the site, but it’s gaming the system to post an answer and then* immediately vote to close. The purpose of voting to close is to prevent others from answering. Either:

1. you’re trying to prevent competition, which I doubt but is still possible; or

2. you’re willingly rewarding people who abuse this site by treating it as a homework-solution generator while recognising that they’re abusing it;

or both. And you’re doing it for +75.

That is what I intend to address.

$*$ Note: The answerer later revealed that he answered the question after voting to close. The order in this case proved inconsequential though as the question was ultimately closed anyways.

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Question

What action should be taken to ameliorate this situation? The answerer intended no malice whatsoever. I do not think the solution is to delete the answer. It is much better to give a lazy student a freebie than to deprive hundreds of good students of good knowledge that they will constructively use to better themselves.

What as a community can we do to prevent this from continuing?

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More receipts

If you’re curious about the rest of the exchange, it was as follows:

thanks for your feedback and +1 for the same. However that is not my motive. The close vote was based on lack of context without giving any thought about solution. Later when I started thinking about it, I could not resist the temptation to answer (it has happened in past with me and it is a typical problem with many interesting questions, typical examples include though integrals). As far the rep points are concerned they can be easily negated by deletion. The real problem is the encouragement for such askers. Let me know what can be done now.

I know you couldn’t resist—that’s the problem and my point—but in reality what you couldn’t resist was the relatively small increase in rep, which is why you provided step-by-step algebra. If what you were interested in was spreading knowledge and nothing else, you would’ve stopped at Cesaro-Stolz. As for what to do now: there’s not much you can do. You never should’ve returned to answer the problem, because as you admit it was still flawed. If you changed your mind on that assessment (which you didn’t), then you could have retracted your vote. I plan to bring this up on Meta.

Answer 1

This is perhaps a little slanted towards the user who answered the question. Here goes:

I've been caught between a temptation to answer and a desire to close before, and I agree it can be an uncomfortable place to be! If only the asker had taken the time to write a better question, but alas, here you are, with a solution burning a hole in your pocket and a question that might be of too low a quality to deserve an answer.

Here are some things I think are acceptable responses to this conundrum:

• You decide to vote to close and withhold your solution until the post is improved. You can write your solution in a text file on your computer (or as a draft in your email program, or in your notes app, or wherever) so that you get the thrill of solving the problem and writing up the solution now, and then you can post it when appropriate. (This can also be paired with other efforts to improve the question, like leaving comments or editing. H/t to Milo Brandt in the comments for pointing out that I missed the comment/edit portion in my first go-round with this post.)
• You decide that your answer can help save the question from the scrapheap. It is certainly possible that a good answer to a poor question can result in saving the question: this is the entire purpose behind the lifejacket and lifeboat badges, after all.
• You decide that you can make a good post which deals with the same question, write up some reasonable context about why the question is interesting and relevant to the community, and self-answer your question with the solution you prepared.

I think the first option is probably the safest and lowest-effort, while the other options will require more work but will definitely scratch your itch to share the parts of the question and its answer that you find to be valuable.

Here are some things I think are unacceptable responses:

• Answering the question without giving any thought to the question's quality. Please don't! This encourages poor-quality questions here and makes the site a worse place for everyone.
• Voting to close and then writing an answer (and doing nothing else!). If one votes to close a question and then is later compelled to answer the question, one should remove their close vote. Close votes are for questions that are questions that should not be answered, either because they're duplicates, unreasonable to answer in their current state, or belong on another site (see the help center page on close votes). Voting to close and writing an answer would then seem to be incompatible signals, and the combination makes reasonable people suspicious that you are just here to play the reputation game.

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As for responses from the community to this issue, I am not so comfortable making pronouncements about what the community policy ought to be. Certainly one can ask the user who has answered and voted to close to refrain from doing that, and if one is worried about the reputation-chasing aspect, then it may be useful to know that if the question or answer is deleted sufficiently quickly, that rep doesn't stick around. I'll wait for one of the mods to chime in with possible remedies, but telling the user that what they're doing is bad for the site is probably a good first step, and the standard close -> delete pathway that is applied to low-quality posts is going to be your friend here too.

There is a larger problem on this site (and indeed on the StackExchange network in general) about users answering questions that they know (or should know) to be low quality. It seems to me that this close-and-answer issue is an extension of that problem, and we have not yet located a solution for it. Thus, a comprehensive solution for close-and-answer issue may also be difficult to find and implement as a community. (I think I would be in favor of a dialog which asks/prevents you from answering if you have an active close vote on the question, but this may be too much to ask for from the SE architects.)

Answer 2

I would like to summarize the key takeaways from this meta thread here. I will be brief (as I am not an expert meta poster, see my meta profile if you need proof).

So here it goes:

• If you vote to close a question then don't answer it even if you feel that the math involved is interesting and gives you a high.
• Show patience while voting to close and if you think you can provide a nice answer to a low quality question, then first improve the quality of question (some suggestions are there in one of the answers here)
• Meta trials are not against any person, but they are about specific behaviors (at least in my case here). So try to assume good faith.
• Mods are more responsible than some people might think. Thanks to them.

As far as the deletion of the answer is concerned, I think the answer was just a few steps away from being trivial so we don't really need to worry about preserving it for humanity :).

In a long and interesting journey on Math.SE there may be some occasional bumps. Just move on and enjoy.

Thanks to everyone who participated here.

Answer 3

If one really wants to answer a closable question, one might consider editing the question to make it conform more readily with the site's standards. This works especially well when the original question lacks background and motivation, which is often the case, and often the question's only flaw (i.e. the question is mathematically sound). I have seen many questions tracked for closure resuscitated in this fashion.

Answer 4

Answering provides a short-term benefit. It helps the person who came here looking for some information and who doesn't want to leave without it. It also helps us, because people don't leave angry and say unkind things about us.

Voting to close provides a long-term benefit. It improves the quality of the site as a repository of information, which benefits future visitors, and cleans up clutter, which helps retain contributors.

Doing both is a double benefit, not a contradiction.

Answer 5

I agree with the following statement in KReiser's answer (italic mine):

Voting to close and writing an answer would then seem to be incompatible signals, and the combination makes reasonable people suspicious that you are just here to play the reputation game.

In this particular case (since the involved user has left a comment under OP, let us save everybody's time of searching), the post is a well-defined answerable mathematical question. What is possibly frowned upon is that it is nothing but a statement. In order to be consistent, the user could

• either give a correct and clear answer and, instead of voting to close, leave comments under the post for possible ways of "improvement";

• or vote to close the post and answer the question as "community-wiki".

Besides the "incompatible signals", I don't consider this as "outrageous conduct".

Asking a so-called PSQ on a Q&A site is not committing a crime. Voting to close a question is not imposing a death sentence. Voting to close a question, if not off-topic/duplicate/spam, means users who cast the closed votes consider the question has yet to be "good" for the site and should/could be improved. Closing is by no means equivalent to a prologue of deletion.

This is a Q&A site for mathematics. Answers to a well-defined mathematical question should be judged and only judged/voted by its mathematical correctness and clarity. The answerer only has the responsibility of ensuring their answer is mathematically correct and clear, and nothing else.

Judging/voting a mathematical answer by the moral responsibility of the answerer is rather absurd. It not only puts the unnecessary burden to the answerers but also brings chaos to the site.

It is much better to give a lazy student a freebie than to deprive hundreds of good students of good knowledge that they will constructively use to better themselves.

Students can hardly be categorized simply as "lazy" or "good". If there is anything to improve the situation, it should focus on objective content instead of the personalities of users.