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Oddthinking
Oddthinking
12:45 PM
@NesreenA, thanks for your comments. It is useful to get a newbie's view to see it from a different light.
I agree that closed questions get too much prominence - you need to read all the way to the end of the title before you can find out it is closed. I thought I had raised a request on meta.skeptics.se to have them more clearly marked - e.g. grayed out - but I can't see any sign of that now :-(
When it comes to having multiple answers, you are right that there tend to be fewer answers-per-question. I did a spot-check, and we average 1.7, which is considerably lower than Islam, Christianity, Gaming and Homebrew, which were the ones I checked, and tended to be in the 2.3-2.7 range.
Part of that is that we have "only" 90% of questions with upvoted answers, compared with 93-100% for those other sites. Part of that is that the fewer answered questions get multiple answers, and very few get many answers.
I attribute that to:

(a) it isn't easy to answer questions here. We expect a high-quality in our answers, which means you can't whip out an answer in under a few minutes, even if you are an expert in the area.
(b) the answers are, as much as we can manage, NOT people's opinions. Reality *tends* to be more decisive - either something is true or it isn't. Once someone has cited strong evidence to support a position, there is rarely good evidence to support any counter positions, so there is less disagreement about the answers.

That still leaves posting an answer that is better referenced, better written, or considers the problem at a different scope, but it means there are fewer answers on this site that draw the opposite conclusion to other answers, compared to opinion-based questions.
 

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