Actually how important is accepting an answer to the Stack Exchange model?

Question

At the moment the answer seems to be not really. It's not appropriate to comment on the accept-rate and there have been various suggestions ranging from moving it to the profile page to displaying it only to the user and removing it entirely.

If acceptance is not important to Stack Exchange then the above questioners are correct, the accept-rate should just be removed and consigned to the annals of history (it does not necessarily follow that if acceptance is important that they are wrong). Having said that, the incidence of accepted answers has started dropping, a lot more rapidly than in the past:

Year Quarter Accepted Not Accepted Accept Rate 
---- ------- -------- ------------ ----------- 
2008 3       14406    3693         79.6%       
2008 4       29316    10409        73.8%       
2009 1       40640    13641        74.87%      
2009 2       55109    20866        72.54%      
2009 3       71370    27464        72.21%      
2009 4       82408    30724        72.84%      
2010 1       104009   38091        73.19%      
2010 2       112286   44839        71.46%      
2010 3       130766   52886        71.2%       
2010 4       142350   58440        70.89%      
2011 1       182457   77480        70.19%      
2011 2       199631   87173        69.61%      
2011 3       206190   91454        69.27%      
2011 4       208593   90520        69.74%      
2012 1       242649   111889       68.44%      
2012 2       247153   121580       67.03%      
2012 3       247080   130932       65.36%      
2012 4       233874   139374       62.66%      
2013 1       25351    22308        53.19%   

These stats are for open questions only as for obvious reasons a closed question may not necessarily get an appropriate answer (or any).

Is acceptance an important concept to the Stack Exchange model? Would Stack Exchange have "done just fine without it" and does it matter that it's happening less and less?

Answer 1

As I see it acceptance serves two main purposes:

1. It shows which answer helped the questioner the most.
2. It show that the problem is solved to the questioners satisfaction.

(which as I read this back are really two different ways of stating the same thing).

Anyway, moving on. When a question has an accepted answer it offers two main benefits:

1. Someone coming along later knows that there is a probable solution to their problem.
2. People who want to answer questions can ignore those with accepted answers.

The first of these is really important. It stops people posting "Did you solve this?" type comments (or even worse, answers) or duplicate questions as they think that the problem hasn't been solved and they can't see another way of getting the question onto the home page again. Hopefully it means that they can actually solve the problem or, at the very least, get a step or two closer to solving it.

The second is also useful in that it helps direct people to answer those problems that are still unsolved.

As to how we encourage people to accept answers to their question - I don't know.

Answer 2

The main purpose of having an answer accepted is so that the asker can indicate "this worked for me." It replaces the [SOLVED] tags that you tend to see in the titles of forum posts. On problem-solving sites like Stack Overflow and the other trilogy sites, I'd say this is important, because it's very useful for someone coming across the question later to see at a glance whether there is a solution that is known to work for at least one person. And as the person who is experiencing the problem, the asker of the question is in a privileged position to decide whether a solution is valid: they can just try it and see whether it works.

But on sites which entertain more conceptual questions, like... well, probably the majority of SE 2.0 sites, I don't think accepting answers is all that important. Answers on those sites are often just as hard to verify as they are to come up with in the first place, so the asker of the question doesn't have any special expertise that would allow them to judge whether any particular answer is correct or not. In that case, acceptance is little more than a "super-upvote."

Answer 3

As someone who frequently navigated to SE sites via google prior to my participation (as well as now), the "Accept" stamp is quite useful.

It means you have to look for two things when researching a technical question:

1. Is the question the same question?
2. What is the accepted answer?

Sometimes you don't even need #1 and you can jump straight to the accepted answer.

Is this failsafe? No, and obviously questions without "Accept" stamps can have answers which are relevant. Non-accepted answers are useful too.

But man oh man is it nice to be able to quickly parse google results of StackExchange sites rather than forums/email mailing lists (partially) because of this feature...