The site reasonably has a limit to the number of questions per time period, e.g. 6 questions per 24 hours.
Is there a comparable limit to the number of answers per time period? If not, why not?
Is there a theory that writing good answers is easier/harder than writing good questions? For instance, if the theory is that it is twice as hard to write good questions as good answers, the limit for answers might be 12 answers with a 24-hour period.
The limit for user with less than 125 reputation points is 480 answers per day (24 hours), based on this:
Answering
- Users < 125 rep, 3 minutes
- Users < 100 rep can't answer their own question for 8 hours
- Users > 125 < 10k rep trip Captcha if more than once per 60 seconds
- Users > 10k rep trip Captcha if more than once per 30 seconds
For 125 to 10K users it's 1440 answers per day assuming they solve Captcha in few seconds and finally 10K+ users can post, in theory, 2880 answers in 24 hours.
As for the reasoning, it's explained nicely in the other answers, I'm here only for the math. ;)
secondsPerDay/timeToPostAndSolveCAPTCHA. If we assume unbelieviably fast internet and answer creation speed, then a user with more than 125 rep that can post an answer and solve the CAPTCHA in 10 seconds should be able to create over 8.6K answers a day.
People that tend to ask good questions don't ask a lot of them (in a short span of time). People that ask poor questions tend to ask a lot of them.
People that give real good high quality answers tend to give a lot of them (i.e. Jon Skeet). People that tend to give poorer quality answers tend to not post as many of them.
Given these observations, it makes sense to have rather strict rate limiting on questions, and very lax rate limiting on answers.
I would imagine there is some rate liming on answers, but there is not much. Just enough to make it hard to post lots of spam answers all over the place.
