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Lately I got the impression that my answers will be accepted as the right answer or upvoted by the asker is less likely if the asker has a low reputation. I do not know if that comes from new users (had not too much time to collect reputation) or more critical users, that don't accept answers, and so the answerer don't vote them up.

Are there any statistics available about that? And is there something we can actively do that the people learn that accepting an answer (even the own one) is essential for stackoverflow to work?

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  • 3
    Note that some new users don't have enough reputation to upvote. Sep 23, 2011 at 18:11
  • Quite often I've had an answer upvoted/accepted several weeks after the activity on the question died down, presumably when the user realised they could do this and went back through their past questions to boost their accept percentage.
    – Flexo
    Sep 23, 2011 at 19:13

2 Answers 2

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There's a learning curve with newer users on using the Accept checkmark.

I think they already get a message telling them about it, but they don't all catch it.

Since they can't upvote for a bit, it seems like they'd play around and check the mark.

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A superficial Data Analysis of Accepted answers

I wrote a couple of queries on Data.SE

This one shows the average rep of the answers with accepts vs the average rep against not accpeted

AVG Accept Rep

AcceptFlag   acceptrep 
------------ --------- 
Accepted       2,100      
Not Accepted  14,003     

I was surprised by this result (are very high users' answers skewing things?) so I wrote this one.

Rep Breakdown of unaccepted answers This separates posts by the asker's rep into groups of 10 and then finds the maximum rep in each group.

decile      rep   
----------- ------ 
1                29     
2               181    
3               569    
4             1,204   
5             2,212   
6             3,955   
7             7,259   
8            13,836  
9            34,158  
10          336,525  <-[Well we know who asked that question]

I'm not a statistician but it would seems that there are plenty of questions that aren't accepted are by high rep users.

This may be because after awhile new users will go back and accept answers once they learn about it while (as @awoodland comments) while high rep users will ask hard questions that don't get answered because they're too hard. Also rep isn't static, overtime rep accrues, but the acceptance/non-acceptance often is after a certain point.

Honestly though since I don't break the 200 daily rep limit very often its pretty rare that I actually care since its much easier to just get 2 upvotes.

Also very few badges are associated with answer acceptance 1 gold, 3 silver, and 1 bronze while there are dozens associated with score, not including all the tag based badges.

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