What is the point of not considering the OP's upvote for Unsung Hero badge?

Question

I have been reading some questions about the Unsung Hero badge (applies to Tenacious too), and it seems this badge is a little controversial (questions arguing if it is a good thing to pursue the badge, the gamification that surrounds it e.g. the guy asks to the OP to not upvote the question, etc).

What is the point of not considering the +1 (upvote) that generally comes from the OP?

I mean, many users upvote answers when accepting them. Some users do not upvote.

If the badge's goal is to reward users who answer questions that do not get much attention, what is the difference under the point of view of getting attention when a question is accepted and has zero score, or is accepted and have 1 upvote?

Ok, the sole upvote does not always come from the OP, but surely the great majority of cases it does.

I think removing the zero score criterion on accepted answers for Unsung Hero will get more community consensus about this badge.

Tenacious (silver): Maximum of +1 score accepted answers: more than 5 and 20% of total;

Unsung Hero (gold): Maximum of +1 score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total.

Please, give your opinion.

Answer 1

Original answer

I agree with the sentiment of this discussion. For a while now I've been thinking that the advice to "upvote and accept" runs counter to Tenacious and Unsung Hero.

One possibility would be to ignore only an OP upvote when awarding these badges. This would correctly disqualify answers upvoted by some random party, but would leak some information about the identity of the sole upvoter (the OP), which may be a bad thing. (This would also make it slightly more difficult to correctly word the badge descriptions; how about

(gold) Unsung Hero: At least 10 accepted answers, of which 25% have not been upvoted (except by the asker).

?)

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Response to AsheeshR and jmac

The above users argue that:

1. Ignoring OP upvotes in badge calculation would impede progress measurement.
2. If measurement were impossible, people would be less motivated to get the badge.
3. If measurement were possible, lone OP upvotes would be de-anonymised, which would be bad.

On the tracking side

I don't have much data either, but I don't believe that the de-anonymisation would be much of a net negative. It is unlikely that all that many of the questions counting towards your badge were asked by the same person, making it difficult to collect aggregate statistics; also "otherwise-zero-score-answer-upvote rate" probably isn't a priority to stick on a usercard like accept rate was (wrongly) judged to be, and it's difficult to determine by other means.

On the non-tracking side

Is tracking progress so critical? I was awarded Tenacious just as a side-effect of answering questions and helping people. If anything, not knowing how close (or far away) they are from Unsung Hero will just lead people to try and post more answers in lonely sections. (That's my theory, anyway. Feel free to produce data that shoots it down.)

tl;dr

Tracking progress probably won't be that bad; not tracking progress might not be that bad. I vote to track.

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Second response to jmac

In the comments below this answer jmac points out that this proposed change would dilute the value of the badges by making them quite a bit easier to get. This is a more serious problem for the proposal, which I don't have a solution for at this time.

Answer 2

Unpopular tags have really bad track records with getting answers accepted, let alone accepted with upvotes. The question volume is low, there are many hit-and-run questions in general, and very little in the way of alternative resources on the net.

Having valuable information not available on other resources located on Stack Overflow greatly increases the value of SO as a resource. People looking for the answers to questions will find them on SO high up in Google searches, and that will grow the knowledge base on SO and hopefully start the ball rolling toward creating a community of experts (or at least enthusiasts).

I joined to get guidance on those unpopular tags, hoping someone would know. Instead I ended up answering my own question and providing 132 answers to questions from other people.

While I don't care much about reputation or badges, it still felt nice to have a nice shiny gold badge awarded for what felt like (and still does feel like...) pretty lonely work. I think the badge works fine as-is and gives those of us fighting our shadows a twisted satisfaction when we rack up yet another 0-score accepted answer.

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Some stats. I have 61 accepted answers according to this query. Of those 61 accepted answers, 42 have upvotes, and 34 seem to have been upvoted by the original poster (they had an upvote around the same time the post was marked as answered). Still trying to figure out how to use the data-explorer to create a query to get the reputations of people whose questions I have answered, but I am finding myself incapable.

If this query were implemented, I would go from being 31% unsung to being over 85% unsung. I think this would dramatically change the concept of the badge from promoting questions from users without the reputation to upvote to incentivizing answers in unpopular tags.

Answer 3

I would guess that the badge is set up to encourage people to take the time to help new users who don't yet have the reputation to up-vote.

From the original proposal, Badge suggestion: Unsung Hero (5 accepted answers with no votes):

Why do this, you ask? Well, one of the much-belabored issues of the SO model is that rep is more easily accumulated by facile participation in shallow, accessible, popular topics, while successful handling of difficult, high-expertise-required issues often enough goes unrewarded. This badge attempts to act against that tendency, interpreting someone who writes a lot of accepted-but-not-voted-on answers as actively helping people solve "unpopular" problems — likely, in large part, problems from new, low-rep users who lack even the power to upvote a good answer to their question, and so may go ignored by more rep-oriented users.

I think we should leave it be. New users need answers more than we need easy badge opportunities.

If the answer was upvoted and accepted you received the 15 rep from the accept and another 10 rep from the upvote, that's a grand total of 25 rep, your efforts have been rewarded, move on.

The spirit of UNSUNG Hero, notice the emphasis on unsung, is to offer some recognition to those who labor without the extra incentive.

Answer 4

Jmac's answer provides an accurate explanation for why the Unsung Hero batch exists in the way that it does.

One major aspect that you are missing is data. How do you know that the majority of askers upvote answers? Voting is anonymous and hence this cannot be accurately measured by any user (only devs can). I, for one, very rarely accept and upvote the same answer.

What is the point to not consider the +1 (upvote) that generally comes from the OP?

• A lot of people are interested in measuring their progress towards badges. Currently, this can easily be measured by observation, and also through SEDE. If asker upvotes were to be not counted then the ability to measure progress would be lost (why? see next point).

• If progress measurement were possible then it would be very easy to figure out whether the OP voted you up or not. This is a direct break in the anonymity of voting. If anonymity was lost, even for just asker upvotes, we would next have comments all over SO asking and demanding for upvotes. This will just be even more troublesome for new users.

• Users may start ignoring the questions from users whom they may know to not upvote their answers. We would have the same problems that were being caused by the display of the accept rate.

• If progress measurement is not available, then there are two side effects. One, a loss of possible motivation towards acquiring the badge as mentioned in comments. The other bigger issue is the surge in meta posts asking why they havent earned a badge, what are the criteria, i should have the badge, etc. This can in itself become a problem.

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It has been mentioned that tracking statistics will be tough. I disagree.

• Per question stats can be easily tracked. Look at the progress percent before answering. Then have a look after the OP responds to your answer. If no change, that means the OP hasn't voted and will probably not in the near future.

• As far as aggregate statistics are concerned, if you happen to be answering questions in a tag where you are not expecting/getting votes from people other than the OP or more than 1 vote on answers, then there is a very high probability that very few users participate in that tag. What this means is that you will in all likelihood start recognizing users pretty quickly, and so will others. Communities tend to form around such tags frequently and users not voting will get identified pretty quickly through comment threads.

Answer 5

Vote up is a privilege requiring 15 rep. If the asker of the question has less, they simply can't upvote.

In low traffic tags (where upvotes are infrequent), askers may have trouble getting there. One may ask two good questions (those who put effort into "doing their homework" prior to asking, tend to have less questions), get at most two upvotes from answerer, totaling at +10, and still be not there.

• ^{Per my recollection, this was the case eg in java-me tag in about 2009-2010, even reasonably well written questions weren't getting much upvotes, simply because nobody else was interested besides asker.}

From this perspective Unsung Hero motivates answering questions from low rep users who can't yet upvote (they can accept though, and this is supposed to somehow indicate answer quality).

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_{It is also worth noting that in low traffic tags, newcomers may also lack experience / examples of how to use Stack Overflow, so even after acquiring required reputation, they might still not know when, how and why to upvote.}