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Today (and yesterday), I've asked and answered two of my own questions. From my understanding, this is an encouraged behavior on all the Stack Exchange websites as it is "all part of our shared mission to make the internet better."

With that in mind, both of these questions have received down votes (this one which is now deleted due to such negativity and the other has managed to pull ahead in votes). My thoughts on the downvotes are:

  • My questions do not show research effort
  • Someone is targeting me or they just feel the question is not useful
  • Someone thinks I'm just trying to mine reputation, which has been discussed here before and found to be fine since asking and answering is encouraged, and reputation is apart of how the site works.

I can't change whether or not someone is targeting me for whatever reason, and that's not what I'm after anyway nor do I think someone is targeting me. What I want to know is:

If one asks their own question and answers it, should one consider the answer given as "research effort" towards the question?

For example, lets take the Nintendo Switch question linked above. I did in fact look that information up which shows a research effort. I decided to report it to our site, as many times before there have been questions in regards to region locks.

As for the other question, I'm not really sure why someone would downvote it. If it's just their opinion on how they feel about the question and answer, that's fine I suppose (that's how the site works). However, I don't think they considered that asking and answering your question is encouraged so that if someone else one day goes searching for an answer to the same question, they will have an answer waiting for them.

Just to reiterate:

If one asks their own question and answers it, should one consider the answer given as "research effort" towards the question?

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    Nope. A question is judged all by itself. The answers play no part in whether or not research was done.
    – Frank
    Mar 4, 2017 at 16:22
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    You caught us Timmy, we're jealous of your knowledge
    – nightsurfer
    Mar 8, 2017 at 14:09
  • Not only knowledge, but self-taught knowledge! Beware the power of self-education, which will, in time, make this whole network pointlessl!!
    – xDaizu
    Mar 29, 2017 at 16:11

1 Answer 1

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As Frank mentioned, questions should be judged by themselves. When judging the question, only the question is relevant, so the person who asked the question, the person who answered the question, whether or not there is an answer, etc is all irrelevant to judging the question. Only the quality, such as grammar, undesirability, whether it is on topic, interesting, helpful, useful, etc should be considered, though not every one does this.

To go along with this, answers should also be judged separately from the question, and as Fluttershy once said,

Downvote the question if it shows lack of research, but please don't downvote correct answers because of it

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  • Though not every one does this, I think that's the majority of the problems faced with these two questions at hand. Can't help that much.
    – Timmy Jim Mod
    Mar 5, 2017 at 1:43
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    @TimmyJim That's both helping and hurting. Some would see that you gave the answer, and downvote cause they don't like self-answers, and some will see that you gave the answer, and give you credit for the research. Voters are people, not cogs in the machine. They do stuff for their own reasons.
    – DCShannon
    Mar 6, 2017 at 21:04
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    ...I don't remember Scared Yellow Horse ever saying anything like that. Do they discover the Magic of SE in Season 6?
    – Nic
    Mar 7, 2017 at 2:39
  • But if you put your research results in the question, and your research led to an answer, won't you be putting the the answer in the question?
    – Kat
    Apr 24, 2017 at 23:35

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