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My question is in regards to the following question.

I've provided an answer. Someone felt that answer wasn't good enough, deleted it and moved it to a comment.

Now, I come from SO SE, and maybe Travel SE has some kind of special meta rules, but the SE way of dealing with answers is to let people upvote/downvote it. If it's not satisfactory, leave it unvoted. If it's bad or breaks some rules, then downvote it.

Since when are answers being deleted by moderators on a power-trip without even an explanation? The only "explanation" I've seen was by user 'Flimzy' who said

This does not answer the question

But he claims he did not delete the answer. So then who did? I know my tone isn't exactly "friendly", but is this how you treat visitors from other SE sites? With attitude like that, I surely won't be bothering to contribute to Travel SE anymore. What if I wasn't an SE user but some random new poster? After this, I doubt anyone would want to continue contributing.

Now, to the actual question and answer:

The OP asked:

  • How to tip in Cuba,
  • As a Canadian,
  • Considering that foreign coins are not accepted,
  • And smallest Canadian bills of $5 are too much.

I've answered:

  • From my own experience
  • Convert Canadian bills to CUC (available in $1 coin denominations) at bank
  • Tip with CUC

What is so unsatisfactory with that answer?
How does it "not answer the question"?

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  • 2
    Let me explain my own comment a little bit, too. In a strictly technical sense, your question did answer the question, but it wasn't entirely obvious how. The OP was, more or less asking "How do I tip with Canadian money in Cuba?" Your answer was essentially "Tip with CUC." That's not incorrect, but it is a little bit incomplete (in my estimation). If you had said "Tipping with Canadian money is a bad idea because of X, so instead..." I think it would have been more of a complete answer.
    – Flimzy
    Aug 21, 2014 at 8:48
  • In retrospect, my comment probably should have been more detailed. I had just commented and flagged another answer on the same question about 10 minutes prior, which had even less information than yours. So I was already a little bit primed for the situation--and that wasn't your fault.
    – Flimzy
    Aug 21, 2014 at 8:49
  • 1
    Generally speaking, the level of activity is lower here so that voting can take a long time and moderators tend to be more proactive (sometimes a little too proactive in my opinion).
    – Relaxed
    Aug 21, 2014 at 14:40
  • Moderators are able to convert answers to comments, and certain answers are autoconverted to comments if they are trivial. AFAIK, the former case is possible even when the user does not have enough reputation to post a comment, but I'm unsure about the latter case (whether or not that autoconversion happens if the user has less than 50 rep).
    – gparyani
    Aug 21, 2014 at 23:23
  • If it's bad or breaks some rules, then downvote it. Not completely so. If it breaks rules and there is a mechanism to deal with that, follow that mechanism. So if an 'answer' is not an answer (not in your case) it should be flagged as such.
    – user40521
    Sep 20, 2019 at 13:51

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Your post did answer the question, however it didn't contribute any new information that wasn't already available. Other answers, posted before yours were longer and provided more information. Still, as an additional data point, this was useful as a comment to show that others had the same experience and recommend the same thing. There's little value of "me too" posts that contribute no new information but only corroborate existing ones, so these tend to get converted to comments.

It's nothing personal against you or new contributors -- it just so happens that Travel-SE is what might be called a "soft" site where multiple opinions are possible and equally valid, and some questions accumulate a lot of answers. Without speaking for the rest of the moderators, I personally try to limit the number of answers to a question where possible that don't contribute a new point of view or new information so that others can find what they are looking for quickly without having to read 10 essentially equivalent answers. There are many converted-to-comments posts just like yours already on the site that you can't see because of your currently low reputation. I understand that may seem somewhat off-putting for new contributors, but as moderators we have an obligation to keep the site useful and usable not only to registered users, but also to random external visitors.

I do hope that this won't discourage you from contributing to the site, and I hope to see some great answers (and questions!) from you.

** In case it's not immediately obvious, it was me who converted your answer to a comment.

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    I suppose this "it just so happens that Travel-SE is what might be called a "soft" site where multiple opinions are possible and equally valid, and some questions accumulate a lot of answers" was the missing piece of information for me. Thanks for the answer.
    – Slav
    Aug 20, 2014 at 19:29
  • It was a legitimate reason for the conversion, but since all it does is reduce the scroll region a miniscule amount (and spark a meta discussion), it seems like wasted effort to me.
    – WGroleau
    Apr 13, 2017 at 15:28

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