Why not simply pass it by if you think the question is based on a flawed premise?
I don’t pass them by for any number of reasons. One, I find that many questions here are not asking the question they appear to be asking. So, for example, someone might be asking “How can I find God,” but the underneath question is “how can I cope with being overwhelmed by life?”
People are not often able to ask the question they seem to really want an answer to. This gets to something that really interest me about fluther. I like talking about the things that interest me. As long as they are related to the topic of the question, then I feel fine about moving to an issue that may not go along with the premise of the question, and yet may answer the OP’s concerns far better than any direct answer to the question could.
Most of us, I have found, are unable to formulate the real questions to which we want answers. We do the best we can, but inevitably we are misunderstood. Or we don’t know what we are going for, really. People in pain, in particular, have a hard time articulating what they are really looking for.
Another reason for going beyond the OP’s question is that the question no longer belongs to them once they ask it. It belongs to the community, now. It is kind of funny because there are several people who are very interested in the motives of the questioner. They want to know where the question comes from. I think, but don’t know, that these people answer the questions differently depending on the motives that ascribe to the questioner.
Personally, I don’t think the questioner’s motives are that important. They are important, just not that important. So we had a question about finding God from a person who called themselves a troll. To a person who thinks motives matter, it seems to me this would completely invalidate the question. The questioner was cheating. Therefore the question should be withdrawn.
I think that’s interesting, but that the question is still valid whether the questioner meant it or not. That is, I have a response that I think would be interesting to other people in the community, or would be interesting to me. It doesn’t matter whether the questioner is sincere or not. I still have an answer that is interesting to think through.
Finally, I wonder who any of us is to judge another person’s answer? I know the mods have the job of judging answers, but they could be, and in fact are removing many answers that are useful to some people. There is no consensus about what is a good answer or a useful answer of a lurve-worthy answer. That’s why we all get to add lurve, but no one can take it away…. except the mods.
The mods belong to some higher authority, and although they talk and talk all the time about their standards, I don’t think they really know very clearly what their standards are. maybe with spam or ad homimem attacks, things are clearer, but there are many issues, such as whether an answer responds to a question in general, where there is no way they can justify their moderations except by saying they, personally, don’t like the answer for one reason or another. Sometimes they have discussions when other mods don’t agree with them, and then you know there are no defensible criteria, because at least one person in power can see it another way. I, of course, can find another way to see just about anything, so I would never agree with any of those decisions. I would see all those answers as valuable (I say this without having seen many of them, so data might change my opinion).
Anyway, I said “finally,” so I’m done, but I could go on. There are many reasons (I’d say “reasoned” reasons if I could) why someone would go further afield to answer a question than an answer that would, to the OP, seem like an acceptable answer. Let’s just say that the OP has a very narrow view of what acceptable answers are (unless she wants to make a joke), and that others have much wider ranges of acceptability. Obviously, closing down the range of answers hurts folks, since it reduces the chances they will get something useful.
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