# Answers with $0$ votes.

Is there any good to keep the your answers with $0$ votes or it's better to delete them?
I've answered some questions lately and some are left without a comment or anything. What's your experience with this issue?

• This happens sometimes. One answer of mine got cited in an arXiv preprint — but hasn't received any upvotes anyway. – Grigory M Jan 21 '14 at 20:52
• Wow! could you provide an arXive link of such incident? – Spock Jan 21 '14 at 21:00
• @Spock: for a slightly different case, see reference 4 in shameless advertisement. Of course I did upvote the answer, so that's slightly different from Grigory's scenario. – Willie Wong Jan 22 '14 at 8:09
• @WillieWong Apparently, the list of references is not available in the free version. – Tobias Kildetoft Jan 22 '14 at 10:00
• @GrigoryM: That (not receiving upvotes) was because it was not really an answer (I still ends with "I'll try to fix it"), although it was a nice and ultimately fruitful idea. But of course I was glad to have read the attempted answer; I might upvote it just for that. By the way the preprint has now been published. – Marc van Leeuwen Jan 30 '14 at 10:39
• Dear Marc, I haven't meant you had done anything wrong — and glad that my [unsuccessful] attempt somehow helped you. I just thought that the story illustrates the point «0-upvoted answers are [somewhat] useful sometimes» well enough (and sounded funny enough) to share it. – Grigory M Jan 30 '14 at 11:37
• @GrigoryM: I'm glad you shared it, and I didn't (and won't) feel guilty about this. Maybe my comment was just a pretext show I recognised the case, and to post the link. – Marc van Leeuwen Feb 1 '14 at 15:21

An answer with $0$ votes does not hurt your reputation. If it is a good answer, it helps the site and someone may discover that it is a good answer and upvote it in the future.

If it is a good answer, leave it.

• There's also the allure of the badges Tenacious and Unsung Hero. – hardmath Jan 27 '14 at 21:26
• If it is an useless answer, it'll get downvoted. Or at least ignored. – vonbrand Feb 1 '14 at 16:41

Unless I notice (or am notified of) serious problems with an answer of mine, I keep them around, regardless of the score. I see no reason to delete such answers, as there is no telling whether some future visitor may come across an answer and find them valuable. Heck, it's possible that users have already found these answers valuable, but haven't gained enough reputation to upvote them.

• Good point about the users who might not be able to upvote yet. – robjohn Jan 21 '14 at 19:57
• @robjohn: Or don't bother to upvote them. I have had a number of answers that didn't attract any upvotes at the time, but later did with a comment that indicated it was helpful, not just upvoting to keep the question from appearing again – Ross Millikan Jan 25 '14 at 4:24

Yes, in my opinion, it's not even close -- you should leave up any answer without wrong mathematics.

I get the sense that upvotes don't work very well for answers (they work very well for questions). There is almost no correlation between the answers I write that I like very much and the answers I like that get upvotes.

• Agreed. I've had several answers ride the HNQ rocket, and only one did I feel actually deserved that level of attention and votes. Happily, that is my most highly voted answer of all time on any site. :) – Wildcard Jan 6 '17 at 13:46

• What happens over time is that either these users gain enough reputation to upvote your answer But do they actually go back and upvote later? – starsplusplus Jan 24 '14 at 10:37