Duplicate questions with poor answers

Question

A question was asked few days ago, which was quickly being marked as a duplicate, and eventually closed: Updating Subscriber(Contact) key in Marketing Cloud

While I agree on a similar question having being asked before, I see the answer provided to the original question consisting of a single sentence (I mean no disrespect, Adam :-P). I have closed a number of duplicates myself, but in this case I see the author needing a more thorough explanation than provided in the old referenced thread.

What would your recommended approach be (in this and similar cases, where quality of the answer in referenced thread might seem substandard)?

1. mark question as duplicate, leaving no new answers (removing my provided answer)
2. leave my answer there, asking for the question to be reopened
3. move my answer to the old referenced thread
4. forget about it and move on with my life

Answer 1

Marking a question as a duplicate should be a way of providing value to both the asker and the community. It should get the asker an answer that they can use quickly, while also saving the community time in answering the same issue repeatedly. If a proposed duplicate doesn't have a really good answer, marking the duplicate can be harmful because it reduces the overall value we develop.

In this situation, it looks to me (as a total Marketing Cloud neophyte) like nobody's wrong. The original question had a valid answer that happened to be rather short. The question really was a duplicate. But you had more to add, and contributed an answer to the collection of duplicate questions that increases the value provided to all askers.

So in this case I reversed the direction of the duplicate and marked the older question as a duplicate of this one. Both will stay around (the upvotes on the older answer guarantees that) but this one will have more links pointing to it to surface the more in-depth discussion.

So yeah - when there's a gray area about duplicates, my decision-making process is usually oriented around making sure the best and most thorough answer is made prominent.

(In theory we can actually merge questions in some situations, but I've honestly never used that tool).