Actual value of accepted answers

Question

I am relatively new to Stack Overflow (about 2 months) and still getting used to how this site works exactly. My main objective here is helping (and getting help) and giving something back to the "community" (never active in programming forums until now). Thus, reputation is not the most important thing to me, although well... it is certainly encouraging seeing how your effort is rewarded via peer-recognition.

What I usually do is answering and most of my activity is focused on low-interest questions. I have tried to participate in "popular questions" but I guess that I am not good at that: you have to answer really quickly on very specific, generally-known topics. I am much more helpful when providing a general insight into a more complex problem, advising how to face a non-standard situation or developing small algorithms. As a consequence from all this, a big proportion of my reputation comes from the +15 per accepted answer, I don't get too many upvotes per question, my "unsung ratio" is really high and my statistics per tag (reputation vs. answered questions) are not too good.

My question is: other than for the reputation gain (+15), having your answer accepted has no effect at all, does it? For example: if I answer 5 questions, all of them are accepted by the asker but I don't get a single upvote, I would get a raise of 75 reputation, but no increase at all in the specific tag score. That is, if the 5 questions belong to c#, in my profile page, the number of questions tagged c# answered by me would increase by 5, but my tag score wouldn't change.

I do understand that this site puts its major focus on peers-recognition but I think that the fact of considering the "selected-by-the-asker" character in one ranking (reputation) and not in other one (tag score) implies some kind of internal incoherence of the system. In the aforementioned example, in terms of c# tag score, having 5 answers accepted with no upvotes is the same as the answers being completely ignored. On the other hand, in terms of reputation, having 5 answers accepted means a gain of +75.

Lastly I want to make clear that I am not asking this question because of, potentially, being beneficial for myself; as said, I don't care too much about reputation, but about fairness and formal correctness. Also I don't expect that this question will provoke any change in the ranking system, just want to share my thoughts and read more opinions on this.

I look forward to your impressions, programmers/staff.

PS: today I have signed up here in Meta just for asking this question and have got a +100 reputation increase! Is this reputation gain really justified?

Answer 1

First of all it sounds like the work you are contributing is likely more valuable than much more widely recognized contributions. Thanks for that.

Secondly, it sounds like you make a good case here for "accepts" to count in the same way as an upvoting in counting up upvoted answers in a tag.

Personally I wonder if it wouldn't also be useful to remind a user to upvote an answer if they accept it without having done so first. It seems quite common for people to accept without upvoting, but it seems rather rare that there would be a justifiable reason for this.

Lastly, the 100 point bonus for signing up on another site is justified because it gets you past the early restrictions that low rep users have specifically because they are expected to learn the SE system piece by piece. Once you have a couple hundred rep on any site, you are expected to know when to upvote, when to comment or not comment and other wise know the basic use of some functions. The 100 point bonus gets you post those basic restrictions on any SE site.

Answer 2

You are correct, an accepted answer serves no mechanical purpose.

However, that doesn't make it valueless. It indicates to onlookers that the asker's problem has been solved, and they are no longer in search of more answers. Before we make any changes, we need to bear this in mind as the primary purpose of accepted answers.

It makes sense for an accepted answer to carry the weight of one upvote, provided the asker hasn't already upvoted your answer. Posts should count for at most one upvote, but either the accepted answer or the upvote button should do this.

Answer 3

A good SO question starts with research conducted by the questioner. None of it producing a good result, even though the issue is not uncommon and workarounds or approaches well documented. A vexing problem.

Such a question typically gets, oh, 50 views when first asked. From 48 SO users that are well familiar with those known workarounds and approaches. And typically will upvote an answer that describes those common solutions because it matches what they already know about the problem.

But two users that actually know the real solution. The guy that posted the answer. And the guy that had the problem and knows that the answer actually solved his specific problem.

An answer mark identifies that answer. And distinguishes it from the popular but unhelpful answer.

Answer 4

I've noticed the same thing with bounties. You can answer a bounty worth 300 rep (which typically indicates a fair degree of knowledge of the subject in question), and yet have that bounty count for nothing towards your tag score if you don't receive any upvotes (which is not that uncommon in my experience).

So basically I agree with you, but if the Stack Overflow developers ever decide to address this issue, I would hope they also consider doing something for bounties as well.