Without trying to sway the discussion, because I do think it's a great question to address. There are some solutions that are just cut and dry, which typically are most commonly asked questions and largely what your casual customers are going to look for. I think there is absolutely a place for that in most communities to help drive customers to self-service and self-troubleshoot.
The other solutions as your SME's put it are context-dependent or partial solutions in which the context of the discussion benefits the user. It grants them the opportunity to provide more details to the discussion to better shape the solution or approaches to solve the stated problem.
I'm intrigued to hear more about your experiment to reduce the visibility of solutions and see what impact that has on spurring better discussion, encouraging members to read more of the topic, and other potential benefits.
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