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I recently came across a rather concise answer to an interesting question that was simply two short sentences:

For me, the render distance was doing it. I dropped the render distance to normal and now the blocks disappear like normal.

While the answer appears to have merit to me, I believe it's more of a suggestion, as in, this worked for me, you can try it, it might work for you. As a result, I mentally believe that the answer is more of a comment than an actual answer. However, I also noticed that a moderator edited the answer recently to clean it up, instead of moving it to a comment.

Since we are supposed to flag questions we believe to be comments rather than answers, I have to ask myself; what is actually considered a comment instead of an answer?

I realize that context will dictate this, and there's the classic examples where users don't have enough reputation to comment (which, could've been the case here originally, since the user that posted the answer only has 1 reputation point), or where the answer is obviously better suited as a comment, for example:

Did you try turning it off in the settings menu?

However, I'm at war with myself in this particular example, so, are answers similar to the one above, actually answers?

Note: I'm not questioning the moderator's decision here, merely trying to understand it.

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    If you remove the "For me", you have something that answers the question. Answers aren't necessarily meant to only be for the OP, but to answer the problem in a way that future users asking the question could also use.
    – Batophobia
    Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 14:39
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    Short and concise answers aren't necessarily bad thing. Since comments are meant to be short-term, sometimes they are better served as answers. Here is the shortest, but one of the highest upvoted answers I have seen.
    – Wondercricket
    Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 15:08
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    I think a key point here is that an answer does not even need to be correct to be "an answer". The "not an answer" flag is for posts that do not even attempt to answer the question, like "I'm having the same problem" or "Thanks, that helped me". It is perfectly valid for an answer to suggest a solution without knowing that it will actually work. If the suggestion is unhelpful or useless, the answer should be downvoted, not flagged.
    – murgatroid99
    Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 15:29
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    @Wondercricket hah, that's the best answer I've ever read! Perhaps I put a bit too much thought into the matter and drove myself down a rabbit hole. None the less, asking has made me wiser on the topic!
    – Taco
    Commented Aug 3, 2021 at 15:31

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The part 'for me' is not problematic. He says clearly what he did, and then that it did work for him.

The thing I have issue with on this post is that he is not adding much as an answer that is 4 years old. He did one of the things that were mentionned in it, and then posted it as an answer saying it worked for him. Probably just commenting on the original answer saying that the first option worked for him would have been better.

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    Since the answer is a duplicate, I've gone ahead and deleted it. Just want to point out that commenting to say that an answer worked is not useful, and it is better to vote the answer up instead.
    – Wrigglenite
    Commented Aug 4, 2021 at 6:16
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    @Wrigglenite: When an answer suggests multiple solutions, a comment explaining which one worked for the commenter can be useful. It might well turn out that one of the suggested solutions works 99% of the time, while another one usually works in the remaining 1% of cases and a third one pretty much never does. But without feedback via comments, we may never know, because you can't upvote just one part of an answer. But you can upvote a comment.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Aug 15, 2021 at 5:53
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    @IlmariKaronen I think to add on to that, especially on a post that old, commenting that it works also renews its validity and "workingness" so-to-speak, and lets people know that although the answer itself may be outdated, it still works. The problem with just upvoting it is that most people cannot see when those upvotes were cast.
    – David
    Commented Aug 16, 2021 at 3:43

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