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On this question from 2012, most of the answers are essentially the same: suggesting minor variations on a similar solution. None provide sources other than personal experience.

Today another two answers were posted in addition to the four from 2012. One, which contained profanity, was clearly spam. The other seemed to be in much the same vein as the earlier four answers: a variation on a similar solution, in this case a certain brand with a certain formulation.

Why did that answer (and none of the original four) get downvoted and voted to delete?

Sure, it's not a brilliantly crafted answer by any means, but I was under the impression that SE encouraged suggesting improvements rather than deleting potentially useful information.

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    You may not have noticed, but most of the members are on strike. I would suggest waiting on this till that's over – Charlie Brumbaugh Oct 8 '19 at 16:33
  • I know that a few mods are on strike, yes. They may answer when/if they return, but in the meantime I'm curious what the rest of the community thinks. – jhch Oct 8 '19 at 16:53
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Before seeing this meta post, I entered a comment under the new answer.

The existing answer outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/3174/4079 says the same thing better, without being spamy. Voting to delete

The post was deleted a couple of hours later.

To the more general question, about similar answers. The help topic says "exact duplicates" personally I don't take that to mean word for word exact, but essentially the same answer, that is worded the same or worse then existing answers.

Why and how are some answers deleted?

exact duplicates of other answers Source

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  • What makes an answer (in general, and in this case) "spammy"? Is it because there were a number of other recent posts by the same user which were very low quality? – jhch Oct 9 '19 at 13:13
  • To be clear, I don't mean this as a criticism. Just trying to figure out what you and the TGO community think about what I think is an unusually tough case. In fact, I was very close to voting to delete it myself! – jhch Oct 9 '19 at 13:15
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    @JohnHughes My response was based singularly on the post in question, which read "I use {specific Product} applied at night" combined with the existence of better answers. Had it been the only answer on the question, I might have been tempted to change the name of the specific product to something generic like "moisturizing hand cream", in this case that answer was already present, so no added value for that change. – James Jenkins Oct 9 '19 at 13:41

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