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I went through my 0-vote answers - clearly they were of a quality not worthy of the site, since they didn't attract up or down votes, so I didn't want to leave them.

Before I finished, I hit a 5/day deletion limit. Any idea what this is about?

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    @belacqua: assuming that's an attempt at sarcasm it basically confirms my stance that not-voted longer than a year can be considered redundant. Jun 7, 2013 at 2:10
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    Hmm. Was not actually supposed to be sarcasm. Intended exaggeration for effect. I agree with @seth's answer on all counts. Don't assume your answers are bad. There are just not enough eyeballs over time yet for even a consensus analysis of value.
    – belacqua
    Jun 7, 2013 at 6:12
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    I can understand your frustration. Time is taken to compose an answer. Then there's no response at all. So the answerer doesn't even learn anything about what is wrong with the answer.
    – user25656
    Jun 7, 2013 at 6:31

1 Answer 1

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Yes. This limitation does have a purpose.

First lets address the first purpose:

Unless you have a very good reason for believing your answer is bad, (downvotes, several comments, etc), then, and only then, should you start to think maybe something about your answer is wrong. Just because no one has voted on it yet does not make your answer bad in any way. Nor does it mean you should delete your answer.

Now for the second (and arguably more important) reason:

From time to time users get angry about something and, finding that they can't delete their account, go on a rage delete, removing lots of valuable content from the site. And, technically, according to the CC license content to the site is posted under, you cannot ask for your question/answers to be removed (although if you have a really good reason, SE will usually oblige). See:

How can I delete my account?

For more information.

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  • wait, that makes no sense (first part). According to several sources on several SE sites, good answers will "bubble up". Even though I put considerable time into some of those answers, they didn't receive a positive or a negative vote, so at best they were redundant. Since the stated goal of SE is to make knowledge searchable, redundant answers should be weeded out. If I can do it myself, why not? NB: I don't want to delete my account. Jun 7, 2013 at 0:41
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    Good answers will rise to the top. Over time. Lots of time. However just because it doesn't have any upvotes isn't good reason to consider it redundant.
    – Seth
    Jun 7, 2013 at 0:43
  • hmm, okay ... I'll review them if I can still see them after some sleep. On some of the SE sites this seems to be true, on AskUbuntu it didn't work for me, consequently the conclusion that they weren't goo and hence redundant ;) Jun 7, 2013 at 1:55
  • There's nothing in the CC license which says you can't ask for your posts to be deleted. You can't demand it.
    – TRiG
    Jun 18, 2014 at 9:28
  • @TRiG Just a bad choice of words.
    – Seth
    Jun 18, 2014 at 12:44

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