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I posted 3 different answers to a question and was prompted in a comment to combine my answers. I do not see any benefit to doing so as the answers are different, not necessarily complementary and I believe can stand on their own. Furthermore, any one of these answers could be marked as "accepted" by the question's author, while if they are combined, the single answer may not be selected even if it has the most desirous material because material in another solution within the answer may not be desired by the question's author.

However, I have seen many answers on this site which cite multiple solutions to the question all within one answer as opposed to breaking them out as different answers.

I would like to know if there is any benefit, convention, or other reason to combine answers as opposed to listing them separately.

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    "Furthermore, any one of these answers could be marked as "accepted" by the question's author, while if they are combined, the single answer may not be selected even if it has the most desirous material because material in another solution within the answer may not be desired by the question's author." Isn't the opposite true as well? If you split up your answers only one of them can be accepted, and it is probably less likely that any one of them will be accepted.
    – Alex
    Commented Jan 3, 2018 at 0:06
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    Related on main meta: What is the official etiquette on answering a question twice?. Basically, you're free to post multiple independent answers and let them be curated (e.g. votes) independently. Acceptance is the lowest priority since it just only indicates that it helps OP the best. However, one can also summarize all the answers and post it as a new answer (and get accepted)
    – Andrew T.
    Commented Jan 4, 2018 at 9:05
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    @AndrewT. Why not post your comment, verbatim, as an answer here?
    – Isaac Moses Mod
    Commented Jan 4, 2018 at 21:09

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The primary benefit of combining is readability. All of the extra borders, voting buttons, links, etc. adds a lot of bulk to the page, and in many cases (especially Parshanut questions) there can be a large number of possible answers. (Also you don't want to look like you're fishing for reputation points.)

The primary benefit of splitting the answers is individualized voting which allows for good solutions to rise and bad solutions to sink. In our site's context (Judaism) this is useful for questions with truly distinct solutions, like many of our posts, where we want to discover which solutions are worth more. Questions of Parshanut or Halakha though don't have distinct answers in the same way (since all answers are Divrei Elohim Chayim -- the words of the Living God -- and we aren't issuing personalized rulings) so one post which provides two different opinions on a halachik question should in principle definitely be no less valuable than if it had contained only one of them, even if the additional opinion is a minority one. Plus we don't want to be in the business of fighting about which positions are or should be personally subscribed to more.

In short: split answers if we want to use crowd-sourcing to compare their values, and combine answers if their values are strictly additive.

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I agree with DoubleAA's guideline for the most part, but think that (1) if it will result in an exceedingly long answer post, the latter should be split up so as better to meet readers' expectations of a Mi Yodeya answer post; and, (2) if one wants for whatever reason to gauge a particular answer's crowd-acceptability by votes, then it makes sense to split it off into a separate post.

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    The concern in (1) can be mitigated with some formatting and meta-text, such as horizontal rules between sub-answers, bolded starts or titles of sub-answers, or even a table of contents at the top.
    – Isaac Moses Mod
    Commented Jan 7, 2018 at 14:05

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