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Badges are supposed to encourage positive behavior (this is even in the tag description). However, I am having trouble understanding how the badge Unsung Hero (zero score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total) promotes positive behavior.

  • Zero score accepted answers: to me, this encourages posting correct answers that are not good answers. For example, code-only or link-only answers or in general answers without explanation. Bonus if the asker has 1 reputation and the question is not good, so that one can ensure that the asker will not be able to upvote the answer.
  • More than 10 and 25% of total: the percentage requirement encourages badge hunters to only provide this kind of answers until they get the badge.

My question is then, what kind of positive behavior does "Unsung Hero" reward? Or what is the motivation behind it?

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    Was the Unsung Hero a bad idea to implement?
    – adiga
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 9:20
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    The original feature request explains the ideas behind: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/3294/…
    – Marvin
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 9:21
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    Physics.SE has 167 Tenacious and 48 Unsung, sometimes they're for unclear or unpopular (borderline OT) questions that remain open long enough to get (usually one) answers but they're quickly pushed off the front-page and not upvoted; the answerer continues attacking these kind of questions. Whether it's good or bad is a bit opinion based. Stats would be great, (cough) which @Glorfindel might SEDE for us (cough Thanks!).
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 10:58
  • @Rob I can help writing a query, sure, but what do you want to know? How many of these questions (with zero-score accepted answer) have negative votes? It seems strange that an answer attacking a question gets accepted, I'd love to see a concrete example.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 14:31
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    @Rob ah, I see what you mean by attacking. I've still no idea about how to produce a meaningful SEDE query, but here's another one which lists the # of these badges awarded on each site (note: you can sort by each column - that query was originally written for something else).
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 15:19
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    I have plenty of answers that were accepted but not upvoted and that I think are excellent answers. The tags I look at don't get much traffic, and the askers are very often new accounts/users and they often don't bother to learn the rules or the ethos of the site. In fact, for the same reasons I also have many answers with zero score, not accepted, and no other answers are present. There are plenty of help vampires out there who simply take an answer and go away, never to return.
    – President James K. Polk
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 17:08
  • @Glorfindel - A quick example of how to extract the juice, how it tastes is another question. --- Create categories (EG of one category: rep= 1-99, 100-499, 500-999, etc. -- another: number of up/down to get 0 -- yet another: months of membership. -- etc.). Create a few dozen pigeonholes and choose the most full, use those few pigeonholes to plot one attribute versus another. -- Not that it says anything about "behavior" just what the person in the pigeonhole looks like. Maybe: "less than a year with one down and one up vote" .
    – Rob
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 17:14

1 Answer 1

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The positive behaviour is not awarding correct-but-mediocre answers, but rather posting correct answers in niche tags which don't get a lot of visitors.

Some technologies on Stack Overflow are hardly used, and questions might be seen only by a handful of people. New users with 1 reputation cannot upvote correct answers to their questions, but they can accept them. Even if the answerer upvotes the question, after acceptance the new user has 1+10+2 = 13 reputation which is not enough to upvote the answer.

So the idea is that if you spend a significant portion of your time helping out in the less popular areas of a site, and you do it in a good way, you deserve a silver badge (Tenacious) or gold badge (Unsung Hero) for that.

Of course, many smaller sites simply don't have areas like that; on those sites, Tenacious (users) and Unsung Heroes will be non-existent. This very site is an example.

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    I have Unsung Hero on Stack Overflow. I got Tenacious without trying to get it, but then I realized there is also a gold version :) In retrospective, I did answered some questions I probably should not have. Yes, I solved someone's problem but today I would probably just comment instead. I am atill not sure if those badges are good or bad.
    – Resistance Is Futile
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 12:23
  • I got it on Ask Ubuntu, mainly I think by answering a lot of new Ubuntu people's questions; people who are too new to know to upvote.
    – Organic Marble
    Commented Nov 23, 2019 at 20:24
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    @OrganicMarble Upvoting is possible when you have 15 reputation points. New users have only 1, so they cannot upvote, only accept.
    – Resistance Is Futile
    Commented Nov 24, 2019 at 8:26
  • And we still don't have a good set of badges for that positive behaviour (working niche tags and questions)... meta.stackexchange.com/a/254753/248268
    – Nemo
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 13:57

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