Meta - should we add a new rule to the sidebar prohibiting single word answers?
It really grinds my gears when there’s an c/asklemmy question and the top most responses are single word answers.
For example, a question asking for the most mind-bending movie will often have the same few movies upvoted to the top (“The Matrix”, “Inception”, “Finding Nemo 2”, etc).
Those truly might be the most popular mind-bending movies, but what I really want to know is why the person answering the question feels the way that they do. Otherwise these types of questions can become stale very quickly, as can be seen on other platforms.
If enough people think that a simple "yay" is funny enough to be upvoted near the top it probably is. If it is not upvoted it is not really a problem. Sure they are low-effort comments but in the age of ChatGPT, you can also write low-effort answers that are much longer. It is the voter's responsibility, not the moderator's, to separate interesting posts from non-interesting ones.
You're asking for a much more intense "quality control" kind of moderation that is one of the reasons Reddit is sinking. That's asking for a lot more mod actions, which is a lot more time spent moderating, and also results in some degree of subjective application of rules for "quality". Heavy mod workloads and subjective decisions tends to drive good, well-balanced mods away (they have actual lives to lead with less time to mod) and only attracts the shitstains with nothing better to do who mod for their own personal power.
Downvote a comment if it isn't contributory. That's what the button is for (not a "I disagree").
Edit: also many of those one word answers spawn a lot of good discussion underneath them. So they're not always totally worthless