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So here is a duplicate question with a decent answer. Is it wrong to downvote the answer because the answer-er should have searched for duplicates before answering? I personally don't think so. If it's been answered already, it adds no value to SO. I was just wondering where the community stands on downvoting good answers to duplicate questions. Am I wrong to do so? If so, what else could I do to discourage people from answering a pretty obvious duplicate? I probably could have found at least ten other already answered questions on this topic.

I do not believe that this question is a duplicate of this one. I am specifically questioning the ethicality of downvoting an answer to a duplicate question in order to discourage the answering of dupes.

marked as duplicate by Danubian Sailor, ChrisF May 6 '14 at 19:14


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    @JayBlanchard Oh the irony.... – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:13
  • Compare the answer to the linked question to the answers to the duplicate. It really isn't that good. – Matthew Lundberg May 6 '14 at 14:16
  • @MatthewLundberg No, but it's not bad either. That's kind of beside the point though. – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:20
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    The same was brought up on a question here just now, so I'll restate my comment: Quick oneliners on obvious duplicates are not remotely near the quality of the answers in the "main" question. It reinforces the habit of new users to ask a question before looking anything up. These are bad answers.. You can expand the "quick oneliners" to anything that isn't on par with the quality of the linked answers. – Jeroen Vannevel May 6 '14 at 14:29
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    I don't think the responsibility for finding duplicates should be the answerers responsibility. I may know something off the top of my head, how am I to know someone has already answered this subject? I don't need to do research for my answer, so how will I ever find out about this? – Joe May 6 '14 at 16:04
  • @OGHaza finds duplicate to my question (thankfully it's on Meta Exchange). Thank you for sharing those. It looks like there's a reasonable amount of debate on the topic. – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 16:39
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    @Joe How is it not our responsibility to check for duplicates before answering a question if we care about duplicates as a community? – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 16:40
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    @ckuhn203, I didn't downvote this answer, but personally it doesn't actually answers the Q and this asnwer is a very low quality. If OP wants to delete rows, they should use revers loop in opposite to For Each row In rng.Rows (and author didn't mention about this) and also if you delete row in this loop, nested loop would fails at some point For Each cell in row.Cells – Dmitry Pavliv May 6 '14 at 17:06
  • and also why do you think this answer was downvoted because Q was duplicate? My opinion - this A was downvoted because of it's low quality. – Dmitry Pavliv May 6 '14 at 17:21
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    @JayBlanchard: could you please point me where exactly the question "Is it wrong to downvote a good answer to a duplicate question?" is answered in the link that you claim to be a duplicate? – jfs May 6 '14 at 17:30
  • @simoco I'm asking because my gut tells me that answering duplicate questions should be discouraged. We have little recourse to discourage people from answering duplicate questions besides downvoting the answer. But, on the flip side of it, it doesn't feel right to downvote a good answer either. (I've noted elsewhere that this isn't a great example, just the one that prompted the thought). – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 17:31
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    It is a "possible" duplicate @J.F.Sebastian and was more intended toungue-in-cheek. – Jay Blanchard May 6 '14 at 17:31
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    My apologies @J.F.Sebastian. I totally understood the question and should have been clearer about my intent. The irony is that a duplicate was found and listed later in the comments. – Jay Blanchard May 6 '14 at 17:41
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    @RubberDuck: Whether something is a duplicate is often a matter of judgment. I've seen a number of cases where a question which differed slightly from another, and merited an answer addressing its unique aspect, got merged and where, as a consequence, the answer was no longer relevant to the question to which it got moved; sometimes dupe-merging is helpful, but if questions have aspects that don't overlap, being able to address those areas would also be helpful. – supercat Oct 23 '14 at 16:33

I feel it is the asker's responsibility to search for duplicates. Downvote the question, but upvote the answer if it is correct.


I disagree: if the answer is good and it's not clearly copy-pasted or slightly "refactored" from the answers linked on the post (or posted by others) it adds value to the post and unless a "posts-merging" is taken into consideration by someone, it shouldn't be downvoted in my opinion.

If it adds no value to the original post (but still: it's not a simple copy-paste) it doesn't necessarily mean that the author wanted to just farm reputation: it's not always immediate to find duplicates for a specific question.

And now for the real experiment: how many people will downvote my answer although there's already a duplicate for your question here (that I saw later after posting the above)?

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    IMO, it doesn't deserve anything so I don't vote (as demonstrated with your answer :P ) – Carrie Kendall May 6 '14 at 13:33
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    @marco 1. Votes on meta tend to reflect agreement/disagreement more than quality of answer. 2. It's not a duplicate. I'm asking about the ethicality of downvoting an answer to a duplicate question to discourage the answering of such questions. – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:15
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    @ckuhn203 1. That's why it's an experiment. I agree that the question is not really a duplicate, but I couldn't resist the opportunity of throwing this small test – Marco A. May 6 '14 at 14:19
  • @marco So perhaps that particular example is not the greatest one, but what about the principal of it? – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:23
  • sorry not following you.. the principal of what? – Marco A. May 6 '14 at 14:26
  • Of downvoting an answer because it answers a duplicate question to discourage the answering of duplicates. – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:33
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    Oh god..... I'm talking in circles. – RubberDuck May 6 '14 at 14:34
  • yes it's kind of a contrived topic I see! Anyway I don't really see the big problem in having an answer which is equally good to the accepted one. In the worst case it will save the user a link-click and a page reload, in the good case the user might want to dig more (like Google's second page of results which usually feels kind of lonely..) in the original post if the solution doesn't really fit for him. Notice that the quality of the answer must hold, otherwise downvoting is righteously. – Marco A. May 6 '14 at 14:47
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    the issue as your answer (perhaps intentionally) demonstrates is that the question that is designated as a duplicate is not a real duplicate . And it would be doubly wrong to downvote a valid answer. – jfs May 6 '14 at 17:26

I believe that it is easiest to always point duplicates back to the original. When this is the case, all of the information about a single question will be in a single place.

For people who think it is alright to answer a duplicate question with a non C&P (or rewritten answer), I disagree. If you have additional knowledge that can help a duplicate question, that should also be posted on the original.

Therefore, in terms of any voting on an answer on a duplicate question, even if it is high quality, I disagree with.

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    the question is about a downvote. An upvote is not considered. – jfs May 6 '14 at 17:17
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    I will rephrase my post. I meant to come to the conclusion that no voting should occur; Down or up. @J.F.Sebastian – Jordan.J.D May 6 '14 at 17:19

Saw this blog post on Improved Question Merging from 2010 — is this still accurate?


I'd thought that an exact duplicate could be merged with the original to migrate the answers? In that case, there would be no issue where the good answer is originally posted, just need to ask a mod to merge them together.

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    If this works, I'd love it to be used more and the answers de-duped. – Michael May 6 '14 at 19:05

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