New badge for questions with a high number of views, high number of votes and no answers

Question

Tumbleweed badge is awarded for a low voted, lowly viewed and unanswered question (it's more like a negative badge).

Now, think of the question that is so mind-blowing in its awesomness that it ratchets up the attention of a large base of users as well as picking up a scurry of upvotes in its favor. But, it also has no answers.

I think it would be a good idea to award a badge for such a question (for a period of time)

The eligibility of question [I mean number of votes, views etc] can be discussed and finalized. For now I am proposing **question with 10+ votes and 250+ views and no answer since 30 days* * .. to be eligible.

^{note: The number of votes and views can be discussed and finalized.. This figure is just a basic idea}

Based on more votes and views, silver and gold badges can be awarded too..

Answer 1

I don't think there should be one for no accepted answers. That would only encourage users to avoid accepting answers in case they get a badge, which is not a good thing.

I quite like the idea of a popular question that remains unanswered for a long time though, along the lines of Fermat's Last Theorem.

Answer 2

tl;dr: I do not think this would be a helpful badge.

The Tumbleweed badge is something of an anomaly - a consolation prize. I could be persuaded to support its abolition (but see later on its one possible redeeming feature). Pretty much all other badges are there to incentivise behaviour that is considered constructive to the site.

Any new badge proposal should explicitly state what constructive behaviour it is intended to incentivise, and explain why there is no incentive for this behaviour at present.

So what's being incentivised here? The creation of questions with catchy titles, question-bodies that look at first glance to be well researched and include a small graphic or sample code (depending on the site), but which are essentially unanswerable. But in such a way that it's hard to close them as NARQ/non-constructive.

That's the behavioru that such a badge would incentivise.

And that's not constructive behaviour.

There are already plenty of incentives for asking highly-viewed and highly-upvoted questions - there's reputation itself from the votes, and many badges.

So the only new element to this badge proposal, is a consolation prize for its unanswerability.

Consolation badges in general are not a good thing - they are incentives to unconstructive behaviour. We already have one, and you could argue that's already one too many. Though it may act as a sweetener to beginners who ask a question that earns it: the Tumbleweed badge might just serve as enough of an incentive to get an otherwise-disheartened beginner to come back for another try.

That's a possible redeeming feature of Tumbleweed. But I see no parallel in this proposal.