I am one such former student. I have answered four questions:
- One where my answer is possibly not useful but has 8 upvotes anyway: that same question about time pressure in exams. It was a relief you didn't pick on my answer as your example :-) I gave a clear disclaimer that I'm not an educator. If that had attracted a bunch of comments and downvotes then I'd have deleted the answer and been more wary in future.
- Two soliciting suggestions for the questioner to select from or synthesize. One about a syllabus (and which entrapped me by saying, "I'd like to hear from a professional computer programmer's viewpoint"), one about homework. Arguably the questions in those cases are bad for the SE format since no definitive answer is possible for future reference, and the one about the syllabus calls for experience outside mathematics education and hence is arguably off-topic. As long as such questions are supported, you may as well support answers, and answers to such questions don't need a rigorous basis since the questioner will pick and choose whatever inspires them.
- One question that IMO is not really specific to teaching, it asks about the language used to present proofs and I think the answer is more or less the same whether teaching or not even though it is of course more important to get it right when teaching.
Personally I would avoid answering questions that explicitly call for answers from experience about what is actually proven to work in practice. But it seems that (perhaps because the site is young) people are still asking questions where they seek multiple views and experience and then use it to form their own solution to their problem, rather than only asking questions where they're expecting to be told the certain "correct" answer by an expert who already knows it. If you stamp out those questions then I think you'll stamp out a certain class of non-expert answer, the question then is whether you want that. It still won't stop students telling teachers what they think of them, of course, as in that notation question, since it is natural for students to think that a student's perspective is useful to teachers. It is useful in general, but perhaps not useful here.
It may be that the site implicitly always requires expert, definitive answers regardless of what the questioner actually says, in which case I should never answer any question under any circumstances. So there's no point me seeing them, and you should maybe look for a way to exclude yourself from the cross-SE advertising in "hot network questions". The same can probably be said for any SE site that believes there does not exist a well-formed, on-topic question for which a non-practitioner can possibly possess a scrap of knowledge sufficient to provide a useful answer :-)
Personally I would describe certain answers, probably including the second of the two you link, as "works for me" answers. They purely describe one person's experience, with no real attempt to justify why that specific experience extends to the general problem. I think it's reasonable to prod such answers with comments, otherwise the answerer may never realise that the site is not designed for survey questions, and questions should not be taken as a call to merely relate personal preference/experience.
