Timeline for Make self-accepted answers rise to the top
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 6, 2019 at 4:32 | vote | accept | Picachieu | ||
| Mar 6, 2019 at 4:32 | |||||
| Jan 6, 2019 at 5:41 | comment | added | Nathan Tuggy | Looking at "we don't actually define it that way", it seems like this kind of genericized fuzziness is a major part of the problem. The accept checkmark has essentially no actual semantic meaning, yet it has a huge effect on site functionality. Why is so substantial a feature still so ill-defined and subjective? That, I believe, is the main source of the confusion around accepted answer pinning. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:37 | comment | added | Picachieu | As I said, that's a totally different discussion. This is about making accepted answers consistent in where they appear, that's about unpinning them altogether. Askers can accept the wrong answers whether they self-answered or not. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:32 | comment | added | Catija Staff | You made the statement, "In most cases, though, the answer that solved the OP's problem should be the one most easy to see." That's what I'm responding to. You can assert that but it doesn't make it correct. The very fact that people don't want the accepted answer pinned refutes your statement completely. 547/-73... that's huge. meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/326095/… | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:28 | comment | added | Picachieu | It's not really related that some people don't like accepted answers pinned at all. This request is to make all accepted answers appear at the top, rather than just some. There may be some people who don't like accepted answers being pinned, but that's a totally separate discussion. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:25 | comment | added | Catija Staff | A lot of people will argue you on that. There are many people who don't think accepted answers should ever be pinned or we should have a way to ignore the accepted answer. I think there are even userscripts that resort purely by score. Accepted answer pinning is a much-debated topic. For active askers, accepting is a boon to questions in changing fields. If the answer actually changes, the OP can choose the newly correct new answer and pin it above the old, obsolete answer. With inactive OPS, the obsolete answer is permanently stuck. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:20 | comment | added | Picachieu | In most cases, though, the answer that solved the OP's problem should be the one most easy to see. And I agree, the goal is to have a repository of questions and answers. I'm not against a question having multiple answers, but the one the OP accepted is most likely to be helpful to future visitors of the question. I understand this could be abused, but I believe it is much more beneficial to just show the accepted answer at the top, no matter what. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:16 | comment | added | Catija Staff | Re: 1 - The asker not needing more answers is irrelevant. While helping that one user is good in the short term, the main long-term goal is to have a repository of questions and answers that will help many people. This is why we generally avoid question types that only help the asker. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 4:11 | comment | added | Picachieu | To address your edit: 1) See here: "It simply means that the author received an answer that worked for them personally." That means the accepted answer indicates the author has solved their problem with the accepted answer and that the asker does not need any more answers. 2) I agree this isn't that big of a deal 3) Not always. I very often find questions by searching on google search, which does not show if there is an accepted answer. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 3:56 | history | edited | CatijaStaff | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 2649 characters in body
|
| Jan 6, 2019 at 1:07 | comment | added | Catija Staff | I understand what you're saying and disagree in this case. Part of the job of a feature request is to show why the request is an improvement. I'd argue that your first point is likely inaccurate in the case of self-answers. Your second point is, I think not really a concern. It takes little time to close new bug reports as duplicates of existing ones. Your third point is incorrect, as the search results show that the question has an accepted answer, and even if it does seem unaccepted, this is hardly unusual. Many very much solved questions do not have accepted answers. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:53 | comment | added | Picachieu | I'm sure there are some times users will do that, but you can't assume everyone will abuse it. The OPs own answer may be the one that solved their problem the best. As you said, the answer at the top is the one most viewed, and in these cases the one that solved the problem wouldn't be most visible. I just don't think it's abused enough that the problems would outweigh the benefit of making the accepted answer more visible. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:49 | comment | added | Catija Staff | if the accepted answer doesn't solve the viewer's problem - That's a big "if", though. We're talking about an okay answer that does solve the problem. The OP can prioritize their own content purely by accepting the answer. This is a huge problem. This is an action that I don't personally understand but I've seen enough people accept their own answers thinking it would pin them that I know it's something people do. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:34 | comment | added | Picachieu | If the answer is okay, though, it's fine for it to be accepted. It may need to be edited to get into good shape, but if it actually does solve the problem, I don't see why it shouldn't be accepted. Even if it's not the best answer, it's not always the best answer that get accepted anyway. And anyway, the highest voted answer will always show up second, so if the accepted answer doesn't solve the viewer's problem, they'll go to the answer considered best by the community. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:32 | comment | added | Catija Staff | I hate to say it but... some people are more interested in the game than the quality. If they can guarantee top billing by accepting their own mediocre but acceptable answer, they'll do that, even if there's much better answers at hand. We absolutely gamify the site but we have to balance the game with the content quality. If the self-answer is really great, it's going to earn the votes and bubble up just like a question without an accepted answer. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:30 | comment | added | Catija Staff | You're assuming an answer that is outright bad or wrong. An answer can be okay, worthy of some upvotes. From what I understand, most people don't look past the first/accepted answer. If it works, they upvote and go on their way (assuming they vote). So, by accepting their own okay answer, they're likely to get more upvotes purely because it's pinned. Even if they get a downvote as some sort of "tsk tsk for choosing your own answer" (which we really don't want), they'll likely net more reputation than they lose since it takes five downvotes to match one upvote. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:22 | comment | added | Picachieu | I see what you mean, but most of the points you made could happen by accepting other people's answers as well as your own. The accepted answer isn't always the highest scoring one, so the community doesn't control the answer shown at the top even even when another user's answer is accepted. I just don't see how it would be any more likely for a user to self-accept their own bad answer than anyone else's. And even if they did, it would probably attract more downvotes than it would otherwise if it was pinned to the top. | |
| Jan 6, 2019 at 0:10 | history | answered | CatijaStaff | CC BY-SA 4.0 |