Once you see that an answer is not serving its question properly anymore, it should be tossed away. It's just their natural life cycle.
They usually kick and scream, raising one hell of a ruckus when we ask them to leave. Especially when they have been with us for a long time.
You see, too many actions have been based on those answers. Too much work and energy invested on them. They feel so important, so full of themselves. They will answer to no one. Not even to their initial question!
The hardest thing about customer interviews is knowing where to dig. An effective interview is more like a friendly interrogation. We don’t want to learn what customers think about the product, or what they like or dislike — we want to know what happened and how they chose... To get those answers we can’t just ask surface questions, we have to keep digging back behind the answers to find out what really happened.
So when you have a bad take machine, you get the following processes:
They make a bad take.
People are outraged and talk about it.
The bad take machine likes it and does more of that behaviour in future.
If, on the other hand, they make a take and nobody cares, they do not get reward and the behaviour is selected against.
The behaviours drove the spread of the outrage replicator, and the outrage replicator provides the selection mechanism for the behaviours. Thus, via the spread of our outrage on Twitter, we have operant conditioned the bad take machine into producing worse takes.
Which is to say, it's bad on purpose to make you replicate it.