Allow sites to opt out of pinning accepted answers to the top [duplicate]

Question

There has been a lot of past discussion about accepted answers and whether they should be, or stay, pinned to the top forever when there are better-scoring alternatives. (Maybe the accepted answer is bad or maybe it was fine then but things have changed and the OP isn't around to accept a better one.) Further, on some sites the accepted-answer concept isn't very useful -- it carries a lot of signal on sites like Stack Overflow, but "correct" is way less clear on sites like The Workplace, Parenting, or Interpersonal Skills. As one person put it on Mi Yodeya, who cares which answer the questioner thinks is best? On our site, we mostly don't.

Clearly changing this behavior network-wide in any way is controversial, and I am not proposing that. (See all the outbound links in the first question I linked, if you want to explore that.) Instead, can we allow individual sites to change it? Allow communities to say "for us, pinning accepted answers is a disservice" and stop doing it. On Mi Yodeya, in about 13% of question views, the accepted answer isn't the best (thank you Hugo Delsing for that query); our acceptance rate is also lower than expected, I think in part because people are reluctant to promote one among a group of valuable answers. Please allow everybody to keep the current behavior by default, but please let sites opt out, like we can for other settings like protection thresholds, meta rep requirements, and comment collapsing.

I think this option is of use primarily to the more subjective sites, but it's possible that sites around rapidly-changing technical fields might also want it. Let's let sites decide rather than trying to apply one set of rules to sites as diverse as Stack Overflow, Hinduism, Bitcoin, and Worldbuilding.

Answer 1

Allow me to call out a couple key points from Mad Scientist's 2015 question:

Skeptics and the new Health site are sites where many questions are asked by users that do not necessarily have knowledge needed to evaluate which answer is better.

In my experience on Stack Exchange – mostly limited to the more "subjective" sites – this is a common problem, and not limited to these two sites. This lack of knowledge, combined with the lack of a "plug and chug" way to confirm if a particular answer "works," often results in "acceptance" adding little, if any, value.

On language sites, for example, the questioner is frequently a non-native speaker of the language in question, and often has no immediate way of confirming which answer "works" – e.g., which word or phrase will actually help him/her communicate more effectively in the future. And yet s/he makes a judgment to accept an answer based on less knowledge and experience than the community at large. Most crucially, this affects future readers – who, if not particularly careful to read the whole page and review vote counts, may be misled.

On Skeptics there is the additional problem that for some controversial subjects, users tend to accept the answer that fits better to their own world view, not the better answer overall. This leads to worse answers being shown first, instead of the highly upvoted but not accepted answers.

This too is a common problem. On Christianity, questions about Catholicism (for example) are often asked by people who consider Catholicism to be wrong. In such cases, they will be inclined to accept an answer that is subtly or not-so-subtly critical of Catholicism's teaching on the subject, instead of the clearest, most accurate, or best-referenced answer. Similarly, while I have less experience sites like Parenting and IPS, I'd expect that many questioners there implicitly seek confirmation of their unpopular (or simply bad) intentions, and will accept such answers on that basis.

All this said, it may be that few of the sites I mention here actually stop pinning accepted answers, and that's okay – not all "subjective" sites are created equal, and there are many other important considerations to be weighed. But this evaluation is best done within each community, where the benefits and drawbacks are most keenly felt, rather than by a global setting that was put in place, initially, for less subjective sites.