Daniel · 14 answers · 2y

Should more users on retrospring give long answers to questions?

Short answer: ❌

Long answer:

Look, I am just stating my opinion here, based on my 3+ years personal experience with question and answer websites: I do not think that a long answer is necessarily rich, in terms of content.

There are some cases where a long answer might be needeed to convey the complexity of the question (which may or may not be long - as is the case with non complex questions), or because a comparatively shorter answer wouldn't provide enough context in order to be clearly understandable.

Conversely, there are also cases where the large length of the answer is simply a result of too much free time or a peculiar interest in extending normally short answers, even when such short answer would better fit the question in terms of clarity and directness.

It is also worth mentioning that not everyone has enough spare time to read long questions, so, given a complex question, it might be worth trading-off some nuance for simplicity. For simple questions like this one, just do yourself a favour and avoid wasting too much time on that: the world is awesome and it's out there, there is no reason to keep looking at a screen, especially when you are doing stuff whose returns are lower the more you spend time with it. I know that might not be true for everyone, I just wanted to vent about myself 😭😭

What I wanted to say is, yeah but there's probably a reason why they don't already do that.

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