[JabavuAdams]

I can see that, but doesn't that point out an interesting flaw in this social site achievement model?

Specifically:

1) There is a question that is trivial to some, but non-trivial to others.

2) I have a carefully-crafted answer to that question (trivial though it may be to some).

3) I need to wait to provide my careful answer, because if I do it too soon, I'll be seen as self-serving.

This is inefficient!

Storage is cheap, so what does it matter to anyone if there is a concise, correct answer that they find trivial? If something is not useful to me, but useful to others, it doesn't harm me ...

... unless it adds noise to the signal, i.e. corrupts search terms.

However, I explicitly chose to improve the search terms w.r.t. this topic.

This is very interesting for me...

[xenoterracide]

It's really more that it seems to be self serving, because you weren't really asking a real question. The StackExchange model isn't really a Wiki, or a blog, or whatever. If you want to write user friendly documentation there are lots of ways to outlet that. SE is about people who have real problems that are really searching for some help, IMO, or maybe the just want to learn something they didn't know about (e.g. what's your favorite editor might get answers that included editor's and reasons you'd never heard of).

I do think this adds noise to signal, because what people who answer questions are there for is to help people who need it. You didn't, and thus it seems more self serving.

[JabavuAdams]

I do think this adds noise to signal, because what people who answer questions are there for is to help people who need it. You didn't, and thus it seems more self serving.

This is interesting. When I said it didn't add noise, I was specifically thinking of question-askers. I didn't consider question answerers.

On the other hand, with a very specific title, people who are just browsing should be able to make a snap decision about whether to read further. Also, it takes much more effort to compose a good answer, than to quickly validate an existing answer.

Consider, that once an answer is there, it's there for all time. We don't know how many people searched for this in the past, but gave up due to poor results. We don't know how many people this will help in the future.

Why wait until they ask the question? When I was learning Lisp, I just used "(+ foo 1)" to increment a number. It was a while before I realized that I could just "(incf foo)". So, in that sense it's a genuine question on my part, just time-delayed from a past self.

Part of good teaching is anticipating what questions will be asked, and answering them before-hand.

What bugs me here is that I've created something. I've organized information -- decreased entropy in the universe. I did all that, but now other people want to bury that information that took energy to create, and that could be useful for all future time.

I'm perfectly okay with someone saying: "this is trivial to me". What I don't like is that someone can say: "this is universally trivial, for all users", let's bury it.

Corrupting search terms can be seen as adding entropy, while improving the likelihood that information will be found is a public service. Picking good search terms is key to the long-term survival of an idea.

[xenoterracide]

sigh I usually only click on other peoples questions if I think I know how to answer it. That's like 70% there's another 20% which might be curiosity, and maybe 5% other reasons. (This is all not including Unix SE where I read stuff to see if it needs retagging or editing or some other form of moderation.)

So imagine if everyone did what you did and now 50% of question askers really don't need an answer, they're just trying to add yet another source of "documentation*. If the noise ratio was that high I wouldn't bother.