First, some simple guidelines for voting, accepting, and commenting that work pretty well for me:
- If the answer is useful, upvote it.
- If the answer is good enough for you, accept it.
- I don't see a reason not to upvote in this case too, given sufficient reputation.
- If there's a problem with the answer, comment.
This section of the OP is a little too vague for me:
The question are interesting and intrigue but when I get the answer I quite literally stare at them, reading it goes over my head, I don't get much time to get into understanding it and I end-up closing the browser tab.
If it goes over your head, this might be a problem with the answer, or the answer might be good enough for you, or at least useful. I certainly don't presume to know which of those is true in your case, but just to eliminate some possibilities, IMHO, the following are not problems with an answer:
- If there's a concept you don't understand but can look up
- This gives you something to follow up on; no answer is truly self-contained and complete.
- If you run out of time / energy / desire / etc. to look things up or read thoroughly or carefully
- This sounds to me like your purpose has been served, and you're satisfied.
- It makes your browser crash (like mine just did! ):
- That's just impressive! Maybe also an indication that you should use Chrome or upgrade RAM.
IMHO, the above are reasons to upvote.
Problems with an answer leading to the "over your head" tab closure effect might include:
- Excessive vagueness
- Some is necessary to limit length. We have character limits and attention spans to respect.
- Reliance on jargon that you can't look up
- Bad writing that's really excessively convoluted, full of extraneous words, run-on sentences, etc.
- People like to throw this kind of critique at me, so I put extra effort into proofreading for this.
- There's a balance between simplification, accuracy, and length that can be quite challenging.
IMHO, the above are reasons to comment.
No one really has time to do all of this appropriately for every question viewed, but I'd say if you have time for the site at all, you should probably spend it first on doing this for answers to your own questions before moving on, just as a matter of civic duty or whatever you want to call it, if not for the sake of getting better answers and paying back their providers. That being said, it's somewhat rare that people really do all of this right (which is not to say that what I've said above is necessarily right for others; only that it's right for me) even on their own questions, so these are only my suggestions of helpful guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules that, if you violate, I will hold against you or anything like that. I'd have too many problems with too many people if I thought like that! I'd also be ignoring the fact that most matters of site usage such as these are partly democratic issues to be decided individually and pragmatically. As such, there's really no use in going all moralistic over it prematurely. To some extent, a laissez faire policy is the truest and most realistic.