Should single-use questions be closed or downvoted?

Question

The Ethereum stackexchange has a large amount of 'single-use' questions that basically only provide a chunk of code and an error message. Often, if they are answered, the answer amounts to not much more than just a fixed version of the code.

Such a Q&A may not be helpful to anyone except the OP.

Closing them as duplicates may not be appropriate, since the situation from which the error arose can be unique. Editing them to be more helpful to a wider audience may end up turning them into a duplicate. I'm not sure about downvoting them either.

I would love some community opinions on how these types of 'throwaway' Q&A's should be approached! :-)

Answer 1

I agree with you. Some questions can be made more generic and answered accordingly but many aren't useful or require an extensive re-write.

IMHO most questions should be allowed since this is a question and answer site. In stackoverflow usually questions are answered quickly and later moderators mark them as duplicates.

For simple questions I add the solution as comment or mark as duplicate.

For more "interesting" questions I try to write a more detailed answer if I can't find a good duplicate. Here "interesting" is obviously subjective.

Answer 2

I've learned a lot from single use questions. I don't think people should be penalized for not making their questions more general. Instead, they should just be taggable as such.

Not everyone here is experienced.

Answer 3

There is no easy way to tell if there is only one person having this issue or not. Therefore, instead of evaluating the reusability of the problem, we have the metric of quality.

By ensuring questions and answers are of high quality, we do not need to bother if they are issues that other users may experience or not. They can always be used as an educational reference in any case.