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Concerned about answer quality recently

I am concerned about some of the answers we've received recently. We have a post on high quality answer guidelines and it doesn't seem the community is enforcing these. Alternatively, I'm rather strict in my opinion of high quality.

Taking a quote from Robert's recent meta post, I feel that we have not been eliminating the answers that fall into this:

Except that many questions I see here quite broad, soliciting a random list of brand preference that are being answered by virtue of who happens to be reading the post. Answers could offer dozens (sometimes hundreds) of different answers with no grounds but personal preference for choosing between them; that's not good. That's not a Stack Exchange site, and soliciting requirements like "it has to be cheap" or "must have USB port" doesn't generally mitigate that.

We have answers that are lists of products, single paragraphs and little more than someone mentioning that a product looks good. I am not a fan of these types of answers, and certainly not a fan of these when compared to several of the high quality answers we were receiving just a month or so ago.

Before I continue, I am not calling out certain users. I have selected answers, not users, that I feel reflect a pattern of low quality that I've been seeing. If a specific user appears in this list, I sincerly appologize. This is a sampling of questions from our most recent questions that are not closed.



I am rather frustrated by the low quality that I've seen in the last few weeks. I agree with Robert's comment above too. Many of our recent answers are personal preferences and have little supporting data behind the recommendation. This isn't helpful to anyone other than a user that is asking what to buy. We should be striving to provide details about why this product is being recommended. What can this GPU do that another can't? What can this laptop do that another can't? Does an answer provide anything to anyone other than the original poster?

Am I out in left field when saying our quality has dropped? If not, we need more people down voting these types of answers. Up votes to these types of answers encourage more link only, single paragraph, low quality answers.

Andy
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