Reduce or eliminate accepted answer bonus

Question

Accept rate dunning has become a meme around here. Yes, we have the accelerated comment deletion feature, but I don't think it's enough. So long as the green check is such a large rep bonus, it will continue to inspire pointless harassment.

Meanwhile, there are other limitations of the big green check. Notably, the OP is not always the best judge of the answer that will be the most useful to future readers of the question. There are sporadic posts here complaining of accepted answers which are counterfactal (i.e., dead wrong).

What if we just didn't have the concept? An OP would have a single upvote, just like everyone else, and future readers would see the community's judgement as the only rating of answers.

An additional note:

I find myself frequently observing the following pattern:

A user with only a few questions (not nearly enough for 'accept rate' to be statistically meaningful) posts a poor-to-awful question. Two kinds of comments arrive: accept rate complaints, more or less snarky, and really snarky criticisms of the question. The later phenomenon deserves attention on its own. The former suggests some of the variations in the answers involving hiding accept rate for people who don't have enough questions to make it meaningful, or from people who don't have some amount of rep.

Answer 1

Removing the huge rep bonus from the accept mark (However while keeping the accept mark itself!) sounds like a sensible idea to me. Alternatively reduce the bonus to 2 points to both OP and answerer, as suggested by Tim Post.

Possible positive effects:

• It might help calm down accept rate harassment, which surely is often about the points and the expectation of "giving back" to the answerer.

• It would more accurately reflect that the OP isn't always the most qualified person to judge on the perfect answer - the community with its upvotes is.

• It would discourage answering very localized questions, and debug sessions, in the hope that the OP will reward one's work with the accept mark. I think this is a good thing - helping a user debug an extremely localized problem is a nice thing to do, but it's not beneficial to the community at large. Stuff like that should stay in comments or chat.

• In the same vein, it would encourage making an answer understandable to everyone, not just the OP, as it's the community that will reward you with votes.

To provide a bit of consolation, a high number of accepted answers could still be worked into some other kind of bonus, like a badge. (If one doesn't exist already.) But I totally agree the bonus could go.

Answer 2

I don't think you can remove the concept entirely. You'll cause a revolt. I was going to say that this is the sort of question I think @Pekka would agree with but he's just answered so I don't need to guess any more.

I'd agree that reducing the bonus could have positive behavioural effects. However, there's a problem.

Would it be retroactively applied? If so meta will be deluged with howling people who've lost thousands in reputation and had privileges removed (revolt).

If it's not retroactively applied then you've immediately given a massive advantage to all users who've been here longer. It becomes that much harder for a new user, or users with less than 10k now to reach that higher level. You would effectively entrench privilege, which I disagree with.

I would be more in favour of modifying the accept-rate system than removing the bonus altogether. Maybe by using bands rather than percentages.

Answer 3

What if we just didn't have the concept?

Well, I think the site would've done just fine without it. Could've just as easily given an asker the ability to up-vote an answer on his own question, and accomplished roughly same thing. Probably reduced confusion a bit too.

But that's speculation. Accept has been part of SO from the start; folks love it so much that when it wasn't possible - self-answered questions - they petitioned heavily to have it added.

Removing it now would cause a major disruption. And for what?

Accept rate dunning has become a meme around here.

Yeah... Y'know, we don't actually need to display that. Let's face it: it was pretty much created to encourage harassment motivate folks asking a lot of questions to accept a reasonable number of answers. The exact number is pretty meaningless; we could just as well display "high / medium / low" and accomplish the same thing with less fixating on it. Or remove it entirely...

But let's be careful here to distinguish between harassment and teaching. Not everyone who shows up here figures out what that checkmark is for, and it's quite easy to forget about it once you've gotten an answer and moved on. A friendly introduction can be perfectly appropriate. But there is no excuse to ever be rude to someone because they didn't accept an answer - the "accept" feature is completely optional, and if someone knows about it and doesn't want to use it, that is their choice to make.

If the latter becomes too much of a problem, I completely support modifying or removing the accept rate display.

Answer 4

For the record, this OData query tells you how much rep you would lose from the policy change:

Percentage of your total rep that came from accepted answers

The numbers for the top 5 users of the site:

Jon Skeet        39.9%       -174030 points  
Darin Dimitrov   39.8%       -124320 points
Marc Gravell     22.6%        -69360 points
BalusC           36.4%        -98685 points
Hans Passant     31.0%        -77565 points

Different from the 2010 reduction of rep from questions, this measure would disproportionately hit the most productive users, while favouring those with few accepted answers.

While I still think it would be a good change in principle, I guess this is enough to make sure it's never going to materialize.

Answer 5

Well uh, I agree with the harassment issues and the fact that the OP may not know what's best, but I also don't like the fact that sometimes the drive-by-n-vote community doesn't seem to read the question either.

So how about an "OP's choice award",

That's a bit cheesy looking (and I meant it to be here).

Anyway, point is the checkmark now symbolizes "OP's choice". This doesn't mean the website claims it is right anymore, like a checkmark implies, it just means the OP appreciated the answer and would like to award additional rep, and mark it as the answer that "helped him most".

Answer 6

IMHO the original rationale behind the acceptance bonus still stands. Earning the green check signifies that a post was most helpful to the question's OP, and solved his problem best/most clearly/most insightfully/[other]. There are also definitely cases when the most popular answer is not necessarily the most helpful answer to OP; both are valuable, and the most popular answer gains rep by virtue of its popularity. In summary, both the acceptance mechanism and its bonus provide real value to the site. And if anything on the site deserves a bit of rep, I'd say "OP acknowledging your answer was the best" is it.

That being the case, it's sad but predictable that gamers and griefers will lay undue stress on those extra 15 rep points (which, I'll add, isn't always insignificant - e.g. for low-rep users still gaining basic privileges, in questions that often don't generate a ton of outside interest). But removing the rep bonus feels to me like throwing out the baby with the bathwater - it's discarding acknowledgement of superior knowledge and effort (and the value thereof) simply because some users care so much about it (and its on-site value).

Griefers can be flagged and warned. As for gamers, I do like the idea of re-concealing the acceptance ratio - I really don't see what purpose it serves to display that publicly, unless you want people to be choosing their responses according to OP's ratio. (Perhaps displaying the ratio only users above X rep is a good solution here, because above X rep nobody cares about an extra 15 points here and there, for sufficiently large values of X). In any case, I am sure there are better ways to deal with abuse and manipulation of acceptance bonuses than to simply eliminate the bonuses entirely.

Answer 7

What if we just didn't have the concept? An OP would have a single upvote, just like everyone else, and future readers would see the community's judgement as the only rating of answers.

I don't like the idea of removing the concept entirely. The OP should be able to express which of all the helpful (upvoted) answers was the most helpful (accepted).

Alternatively reduce the bonus to 2 points to both OP and answerer, as suggested by Tim Post.

I see two problems with this:

• New users don't yet have the privilege vote up, as it requires 15 rep.

• Reputation form accepted answers is exempt from the rep cap.

  For instance, this would imply a mayor reputation hit for our top users.

The real issue, in my opinion, is that the OP can upvote and accept one of the answers, multiplying the reputation earned by 2.5.

My suggestion

Retroactively disable upvotes from the OP when an answer gets accepted, without changes the reputation bonus either one generates.

This leaves us with:

• Most helpful answer: 15 rep (exempt from rep cap)

• Helpful answer: 10 rep

Answer 8

As primer, let me state up front that I'd be fine with getting rid of the bonus for accepted answers, but I'm not sure that getting rid of them would resolve the accept rate harassment issue. Perhaps removing that from individual users as a whole would be a better course of option?

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I'm comfortable with letting the community decide what they think is the best answer through their upvotes, since it's been the case (and will continue to be) that users will accept answers that aren't based entirely in fact, are subjective, or are just dead wrong.

The main purpose that accepted answers serve, to me, is that an asker has received an answer that they deem is applicable and correct to their situation. This may seem counter-intuitive, at least in the sense that sometimes the truly best answer is accepted, or that some other answer is accepted, but that's how it seems.

How about this for a twist/food-for-thought: Let the Community decide which question merits acceptance, for +0 reputation, based on the total number of upvotes, revisions, and comments to the post. Quality and accuracy could be weighed in a similar manner that "poor" questions are found.

Answer 9

There are several points being missed here.

1. Questions with no accepted answers should either be rewritten or deleted. If no one answered a question "properly," it's usually the sign of a bad question.
2. The check mark should be an indication that a question was addressed, and not just left hanging. Questions with no accepted answers are generally bad questions.
3. The whole Q&A format idea is a good one, but it typically degenerates into "How can i fix my localized problem?" This isn't a bad thing, necessarily; if you take away check marks, then localized answers (which may sometimes be generally applicable) will get no love.
4. Knowing that someone has a 10% acceptance ratio is a good metric for deciding whether it's worth spending significant time answering their question. Why answer the question at all if it won't get accepted, and it's not applicable to 3,000,000 other people who might vote it up?

Rep is really just a way of keeping score. If you make it too hard for people to earn rep, they may decide it's not worth it. YMMV.