What is meta? ×

As I hang out on ServerFault more I'm noticing lots of questions that get only "Yes" or "No". I think this is a worthless, rep-grab answer. They are especially worthless when they were able to post "No" first, get voted to the top, and bury the nice paragraph answer on why its "No" that's posted hours later.

While I agree that sometimes a simple "Yes" or "No" does completely answer the question, 90% of the time it simply answers a question with more questions.

Even once it was because the answerer thought the question was low effort, therefore deserved a worthless answer. I disagreed with the question being worthless, but it also makes his answer worthless for anyone else that tries to go to the question for more information. For reference someone else posted a very detailed answer which shows that yes, this question is really more than a yes or no question

The issue though is that several times the people doing it have over 10k rep, which makes me hesitant to flag. I also don't want to burn through my flags and clog the flag queue if mods are just going to ignore it.

Should I flag answers consisting only of "No" or "Yes"?

share|improve this question
Should I ask simple "Yes" or "No" questions? –  Josh Lee Oct 24 '11 at 15:43
Yes​​​​​​​​​​​​ –  The Guy with The Elf Hat Apr 17 at 14:56

3 Answers 3

up vote 54 down vote accepted


...that wasn't very helpful in answering your question, was it? If someone asks a yes/no question there's always an implied "and why" even if they don't ask for it.

Even if the original asker only wanted one data point with no reasoning behind it, showing the reason for a yes/no answer makes the answer useful to more than just the single asker, which is the whole point of Stack Exchange.

share|improve this answer
+1 for the last sentence. I knew I should have mentioned it. –  BalusC Oct 24 '11 at 16:19


I'd also like to see answers which explains the concrete answer in depth as in why it's a "Yes" or a "No", preferably along some links and quotes from authoritative or historical resources.

However, if the question in turn is of very low quality and/or rhetorical, then I'd rather downvote the question, vote for a close as Not a real question and ultimately vote for deletion of the question. In such case, I'd not vote/flag the answers at all, but just ignore them all. If the question get deleted, they'll lose all votes anyway.

share|improve this answer

No, not necessarily, if it actually answers the question, then it shouldn't be flagged.

A lot actually depends on the question. Was it a yes/no question? If it wasn't, then the answer might not be a real answer. If it was, but you don't think in that case it's adequate then just encourage them to add more content, edit some in, or downvote it.

share|improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .