Is there anything that can be done about duplicate answer spam?

Question

Some of our questions, especially good ones, draw a LOT of answers. Unfortunately, a lot of the time many of those answers make the same points over and over, often without introducing any new information. Even when they do differ somewhat we often have a situation where someone asks something like "Does X let me do Y?" in a given system and gets "No, because A", "No, because B", "No, because A&B", "No because A, B, and/or C", "No because A and B but definitely not C", "No, because A, phrased differently" as answers. This is a problem if I believe the answer is 'Yes, because D' because the pile of answers, as long as they are above 0 votes (and in such cases the majority of them will be, albeit just slightly), but adding another answer to a massive pile of answers seems problematic because the signal/noise ratio on the page is so low and even if I'm reasonably convinced my answer is correct and the existing answers are incorrect it is hard to justify the inherent increase in page noise.

Generally it's not that we have a lot of different answers — that would be fine because then probably there's an answer I agree with and can upvote instead of posting another one. It's that we have a lot of the same answer, kinda spread out into a mess. Usually it's not so obvious that the answers are the same and each one repeats a lot of stuff (often unintelligibly unless you've read the rest of the answers), but also makes a perhaps-off-topic, perhaps-on-topic point or two that feels like the real reason the answer was posted. Sometimes, though, they are entirely redundant and add no new material whatsoever.

Is there anything we can do about this? Are other people also experiencing this?

For example, Make the player roll even if there is no chance of success? has duplicate and semi-duplicate answer pairs of the nature I'm talking about. Note in particular:

• #76530 and #76532

• #76528 and #76564

• #50261 seems particularly bad, copying #50216 and only adding a minor violation of the Be Nice policy.

And here's another question with a lot of regurgitation of material in answers.

Answer 1

There is plenty to be done: its called voting

In theory, the voting system allows better answers to float to the top and poorer answers to sink into the swamp. In addition, the OP has the power to bring a single answer right to the top by accepting it.

In practice, a question with many answers will usually result in new viewers only reading the first few answers and voting (or not). This is unfortunate, however, voting by participants is neither compulsory nor deliberately subject to guidelines (unlike accepting an answer where it is suggested that people wait a day or so).

Does this dissuade latecomers from provided what might be the best answer to the question? Possibly. If they overcome their trepidation does it mean that this world's greatest answer gets mired 3 posts from the end? Probably. Is this a problem? No.

This isn't a problem because the stack is not about providing the world's greatest answer: its about providing an answer that satisfactorily solves the OP's problem and then leaving that as a legacy for those who follow.

Questions that attract a lot of answers (>5) are typically subjective (hopefully good subjective) and, by definition, there are better and worse answers to those types of question but there is no right answer. As an example, there isn't be a best answer to the following question but there are lots of good answers and many, many bad ones:

War and Peace is a historical novel. Tolstoy made great efforts to ensure the accuracy of his facts and dates, and the characters of Tsar Alexander I, Napoleon, Speranski, and other dignitaries generally respect historical factuality. Yet almost all the important and interesting characters in the novel are fictional. Why does Tolstoy merge fact and fiction in this fashion?

(Anyone want to guess what I happen to be reading right now?)