Should I flag a poor answer as not an answer?

Question

I don't know the answer to this question. I'm torn on the abilities I now have and know I can edit an answer, flag an answer, and downvote an answer (or ignore).

I don't really want to flag improperly, and yet, answers that seem to be of the type of:

Well, in my own world, I don't use that word, but use this word.

or

Really? That's the word? No way, it really should be this word.

These seem more like comments. So as I'm able to vote on delete as well, I'm trying to figure out the proper way to wield the hammer without seeming to be too overbearing on this. It seems contrary to the intent of SE to leave highly downvoted/poor quality answers as answers in the list.

Should one delete his answer if it's found to be poor is a good point on the other (submitter) side.

So, what's the best way to handle this? Move to delete, flag, downvote or ignore?

Answer 1

This has been touched on before, but a brief walk through the low-quality review queue history this morning has shown me that we need to revisit it.

The remedy for a wrong answer is downvoting, not deletion.

Note that answers that are clear and address the question at least a little, but are fundamentally wrong, should be downvoted, not deleted. A wrong answer still “looks good”.

That last part hurts, I know. Clicking “Looks Good” for an answer you know for an absolute fact to be wrong is almost physically painful. If it were up to me, I'd rename it to something that doesn't inspire life-threatening cognitive dissonance. But it's what we have, and it should be used as intended.

The important thing to remember is that bad answers can be helpful too, by showing people what not to do. That goes for not only wrong answers, but answers that address the question but are insufficiently supported, or even just plain useless.

Here's an answer with four votes to delete. Why? Because the poster pulled it out of his ass? So downvote it and explain why. If this answer sits around with a negative score and comments explaining why it's not a good answer, might it not help observant people understand that the road to success here does not involve pulling things out of your ass? And if that prevents even one prospective answerer from making the same mistake in the future, doesn't that justify keeping it around as an example of an anti-pattern?

By contrast, a deleted answer doesn't teach anybody anything, which is why deletion should be reserved for the truly hopeless cases: spam, complete gibberish, comments posted as answers, etc.