The Problem: The Q&A's on Spectrum are a meme. Everyone knows it. Nearly all of the youtubers who comment on it will mention how bad the questions are. As do most people who are regulars on spectrum as well as all of the orgs I interact with. Please note, I'm not trying to dog on the people who ask these questions and I'm not calling their questions dumb. But The top voted questions are almost always ones that have already been answered in a dozen places on spectrum, youtube, Twitch, and the RSI website. Because of the types of questions that get asked, very little new information gets provided during these Q&A's which makes them some of the most frustrating videos and comm-links that CIG puts out. The cause: Questions are posted by people who don't read any of the info but who still manage to be on the website at the very second the post goes live. If you aren't asking your question within seconds of the post, your question has only a tiny chance of getting seen by any significant number of people. Since a large percentage of people don't have time to rummage through the website looking for answers to every question they think of, they ask these questions that are answered elsewhere in Q&A's and, as a result, Q&A's end up being redundant, uninformative, posts that gives us very little more than the Brochures, engineering posts, and ship pages don't already give us; and what isn't answered there is information that is readily deduced from those posts. I believe that the REASON these Q&A posts are so unpopular is because these questions that are already answered elsewhere, despite being most upvoted, are NOT actually the most popular; they are simply the most viewed because of their position at the top of the thread. Evidence: The assumption is that the most upvoted questions are the most popular. This is not the case. Nearly everyone I talk to about this agree that they see a Q&A, read through the top several questions, realize that most of them are bad, unanswerable, or that we already know the answer. Then they move on, vote on nothing and leave frustrated that it will be yet another useless Q&A. I am positing here that the most upvoted is almost Never the most popular. Take evidence here. Exhibit A The post, at the time of this screen shot, has 2,645 views and 729 replies. That's 3 pages of replies. Most of which won't even get looked at because people don't generally scroll through all of the posts that they know won't get selected. It takes a crap ton of time to read through all of that. Exhibit B: Notice that the top voted question got 471 upvotes. The first thought is "Wow! That's a lot of votes!" but it isn't. This indicates that, out of 2,645 people, the ONE question that EVERYONE who gets on the post has time too read got less than 1 vote for every 5.8 viewers. That means the question was only favored by 17.8% of the population that visited this post. 17.8% is not popular by any stretch of the definition; especially when it is the one question that was guaranteed to get the most views. Perhaps there are questions further down that would have been more popular. Maybe there aren't, but we don't know because 2174 viewers scrolled through the top several "most upvoted" questions and didn't even think the question was worth the time it takes to click an upvote button. But they also didn't think it worth their time to scroll through 3 pages of comments that they know will never get enough attention to make it into the Q&A itself. The solution: For the Moderators- Allow members of the community to post links to answers for questions in the Q&A thread. Still delete commentary or off the cuff answers or responses, but allow for the posting of links so that those questions can still be answered for the people who ask them and so that Q&A threads are not just repositories of already answered questions that are getting re-answered, but also, the people who asked those questions don't get ignored and don't feel disenfranchised. Turbulant- Please give us a downvote button. At LEAST for the Q&A's. Give those 2,174 people who showed up more than ten minutes into the Q&A thread a chance to have a voice in what was asked. If the goal is that the most popular questions get answered, then "most upvoted" is a very poor metric in a system that has no downvoting. Adding a downvote would allow questions lower down the page a chance to rise up and get seen and voted on. With the end result being that eventually the actual popular questions can rise to the top, not just the first few getting confirmation bias because they're the only ones anyone sees. I understand that we don't include a downvote in general spectrum because we don't want people to use it maliciously, but in the case of Q&A posts, or any other post where we actually want the actual most popular post to be at the top, it needs to be implemented.