Ways to encourage users to 'Accept' answers

Question

I have thought about ways to encourage people to accept answers on SO (and other sites). I am not certain the best possible way. I would like to encourage feedback as to what you think. Here are a few ideas I am thinking of.

What if we leverage a point/voting system:

1. If you drop below a certain acceptance percentage, you cannot post any additional questions. This could be remedied by:

   • going to questions and accepting answers to improve acceptance rate
   • user must answer 5 questions with at least 2 up votes per question

2. Users can "suppress" other users. Meaning, I can choose to not see questions by specific users or users who fall below a certain threshold on their acceptance rate.

I think the idea is to encourage participation. But how can we do that with those who are simply one timers looking for answers and not willing to contribute?

UPDATED: Maybe there could be highlighted background for a user who falls below a certain accept rate. In addition, I am thinking that in the case there was no accepted answer, the user can indicate that there was no acceptable answer and put a comment of a certain number of characters minimum as to why there was no accepted answer.

Answer 1

if you drop below a certain acceptance percentage, you cannot post any additional questions.

So if i happen to post some questions no-one can answer i'm locked out? Meh.

Meaning, I can choose to not see questions by specific users or users who fall below a certain threshold on their acceptance rate.

Same here.

Nearly all users use the accept-features where applicable after an explanatory comment so i don't see the big problem. If those and the reminders in the profile page are not enough there is probably nothing that can be done without locking unlucky well-intentioned users out.

Answer 2

First off, on the concept of ignoring or suppressing users:

Ignoring/Suppressing

This is my answer from "Add The Ability To Ignore Users", but I'll quote Marc's answer (much shorter)

• if an individual post offends you: flag that post
• it the mere existence of another user offends you: grow up

Ignoring problem users is a toxic feature that makes the experience better for some users at the expense of the entire community. And that feature dicussion was about ignoring particular users who were abrasive and offensive. That is at least a valid reason to want to ignore. As I'll get to later, "low accept rate" is not a valid statistic to draw conclusions from.

Punishing For Acceptance Rate

Please read this answer. It is absolutely comprehensive.

I'll give you some highlights.

• Adding questions is generating content. As long as answers exist, they can help others.

• Users who ask well written but obscure questions would find themselves punished.

• Accepting the wrong answer is worse than accepting nothing at all.*

• StackOverflow is about content not *users.

All of these things put together indicate that looking at someone's acceptance rate does not tell you why they have that rate. So changing your behaviour based on it would be inappropriate.

*_{This one doesn't have a link because I haven't yet written a tirade about it. But hopefully it should be self-explanatory}

Answer 3

If you don't like answering questions from users with low accept rates, then don't. What are your priorities? Do you want to help people solve problems and learn new things, or is your goal to gain as much reputation as quickly as possible? I understand that the reputation system makes it more worthwhile for people to answer questions, but I don't see it as the ultimate purpose of the site.

Yes, it's painful to post a great answer to a question and have it be abandoned, but would it have been better for the question to never have been asked, because the user didn't accept other answers? If they don't accept answers, then people won't answer their questions, the mechanism works as intended. In the end, the person doing the asking is the one who will get hurt. Not you, not me, nor anyone else on StackOverflow.

Answer 4

I quite like how Yahoo's Q&A site handles this. If an answer hasn't been chosen as the best / correct then the community can vote to choose the best answer.

There is a given time frame to do this at the end the answer with the most votes is chosen as the most suitable.

The other thing that could be included with this is allowing for anyone to vote to close the question during this period.

Anyone in the community is just as worthy, if not more of deciding the best answer, especially if it has been asked by someone who regularly posts questions but doesn't accept answers.

Answer 5

I find the accepted answer to be a valuable feature. Often the accepted answer is what I've sought for when I've had a similar problem and I don't think banning users from posting question is a viable solution. Why force them to go somewhere else. I would however still like encouragement to accept answers, since that does provide value to all others with similar problems. Take the debate of whether or not to delete greetings and salutations from questions. One of the arguments to do so is to make it quicker to scan. Compare that to not have to scan every single answer if nothing is accepted.

So if we keep in mind that content (questions and answers alike) and the ability to find the content sought for as quickly as possible is the aim of the game then a way to encourage could be to allow posting new questions, allow for answers to the question but disallow OP with a low acceptance rate to read the answers for a day or two or until the acceptance rate is up over a given limit. The latter can usually be achieved in minutes.