Remove the 25% requirement from the "Unsung Hero" gold badge

Question

The description currently reads:

Zero score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total.

The English sentence is really awkward and ambiguous: exactly 25%? >= 25%? <= 25%? it doesn't say (but the correct answer is >= 25%).

Besides that, I think requiring that at least 25% of your total answers should have no votes makes no sense.

Almost all the badges we have (if not all) are there to encourage good behavior. However if I want to get this badge I will have to intentionally try not to get my answers upvoted and the more helpful I was the more difficult it will be. For someone like Jon Skeet, getting this badge will be impossible because he will have to post more than 15,000 extra answers - and all of them would have to be accepted and not upvoted.

This seems a bit backwards to me. However without the 25% requirement (that no one asked for in the proposal thread) this badge makes sense since it encourages answering very difficult and obscure questions, while still being able to contribute to "normal" questions without jeopardizing your work on this badge.

And please change the wording to something more natural:

Posted at least X answers which have been accepted but not upvoted.

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Answering part of waffles' answer (his full answer is right below, I accepted it so it shows up to the top):

Take david kanarek for example, he posts lots of answers in the iPhone tag, for example this one, a correct technical answer for a complex iPhone issue. The thing is, for some reason people do not upvote this stuff. Perhaps the iPhone crowd did not discover upvote button, perhaps its the low views, who knows. What we do know is that we want David to keep on contributing to Stack Overflow, so we give him a badge for his efforts.

Well, let's take other examples. I'll take the 3 last users who got awarded the badge: Murph, invertedSpear, hunter.

Murph

• Top tags: C#, asp.net, .net, sql-server, sql. They don't really look like unknown and obscure tags.. In fact they are the post popular!
• Now, some examples of accepted answers with zero votes. One, two, three, four.. Most of them are very short and just contain a link. In many cases there are other upvoted answers (but the OP accepted his). Honestly, they don't seem great answers. Murph if you are reading this sorry, I just picked your name randomly - nothing personal - but I wouldn't call him an "unsung hero".

InvertedSpear

• Top tags: flex, actionscript-3, flex3, actionscript, xml
• Answers: one, two (answered his own question), three, four.. Again in all honesty they don't seem great answers.

Hunter

• asp.net, C#, jquery, asp.net-mvc, javascript. Again, popular tags.
• Answers: one, two, three, four.. Again, all seem very "average" answers.

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The concept here is to give these "poor users" that participate in tags that are not wildly followed or upvoted or happen to answer less popular questions some extra incentive to keep on making Stack Overflow better.

Did you look at the data before stating this? I manually went through the vast majority of the user profiles who got the badge. Around 75% of them (and that's being conservative, it's probably more) are active only in very popular tags such as c#.

This is not meant to be another badge amongst the 1400 badges Jon Skeet already has, its about giving these users that contribute in a less popular way an incentive to keep contributing.

But it's based on luck, it's not something you can actually work towards. You just have to be lucky, and if you don't get it by the time you have - let's say - 5,000 rep, you will never able to get it. If it's a lottery that you can't even keep participating in after a certain point it doesn't encourage any behavior.

Yes, there are other very luck based badges, but you can keep working towards them until you eventually obtain them. You can't in this case.

Answer 1

I stand behind this decision.

First lets look at the definition for unsung hero:

a person who makes a substantive yet unrecognized contribution; a person whose bravery is unknown or unacknowledged

from dictionary.com

I agree that Jon / Marc and Eric may make substantive unrecognized contributions at times, but their "bravery" is very acknowledged. They should not be getting this badge.

If you think there needs to be particular tweaks to this badge, post separate requests, with backing data, one per request. Some reasonable ones I heard are giving it out retrospectively, or changing zero score to zero votes. But before doing this I need to look at backing data.

If you think there needs to be a new badge that acknowledges participation in obscure tags, I'm totally for it, but this should be a new badge that we need to think out. Post a separate meta proposal on it.

The concept here is encourage a behavior that is not normally encouraged using our reputation system. It is not meant to be a badge that is easily achievable nor is it meant to be a badge that everybody wants to get.

The concept here is to give these "poor users" that participate in tags that are not wildly followed or upvoted or happen to answer less popular questions some extra incentive to keep on making Stack Overflow better.

Take david kanarek for example, he posts lots of answers in the iPhone tag, for example this one, a correct technical answer for a complex iPhone issue. The thing is, for some reason people do not upvote this stuff. Perhaps the iPhone crowd did not discover upvote button, perhaps its the low views, who knows. What we do know is that we want David to keep on contributing to Stack Overflow, so we give him a badge for his efforts.

This is not meant to be another badge amongst the 1400 badges Jon Skeet already has, its about giving these users that contribute in a less popular way an incentive to keep contributing.

Answer 2

EDIT Normally I put my edits at the end, but this is important enough.

This badge will not accomplish it's purpose: Encouraging users to participate in low-view tags.

• Most pre-existing users cannot get this, they are burdened by all their valid contributions.

• Pre-existing users who already do this will get this badge. But then we are rewarding behaviour which already occurs. This won't encourage more users to join, because the only ones who could get the badge, will already have it.

• New users can "easily" (with hard work) get this badge, if they know about it. But if they do not know about this badge, then it is likely that they will end up in one of the most common tags, and then only see the badge later, once it is too late for them to get it.

If you look carefully, you'll notice that none of those situation provide a benefit to the askers of low-interest questions. They still have the same (very small) pool of answerers. There is still no incentive for the users of of high-rep tags to switch.

Now onto the original response:

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This is an extended reply to Waffles, as his is the official response on this issue.

The concept here is encourage a behavior that is not normally encouraged using our reputation system.

This is an absolutely critical thing. I completely agree that the behaviour that it is designed to encourage is something that we want to encourage.

The concept here is to give these "poor users" that participate in tags that are not wildly followed or upvoted or happen to answer less popular questions some extra incentive to keep on making Stack Overflow better.

However, it was done backwards. Instead of having Robert, Jeff or Joel post a meta-question along the theme "How do we encourage more activity in low-reputation tags", they latched onto a badge proposal. Rather than designing a solution to a problem, they grabbed a "solution" and tried to back-engineer it towards the problem.

This is not meant to be another badge amongst the 1400 badges Jon Skeet already has, its about giving these users that contribute in a less popular way an incentive to keep contributing.

We already have the [Necromancer] badge. The [Necromancer] badge is far superior for this one overarching reason: You are NOT punished for previous behaviour.

This is why the [Electorate], [Unsung Hero] and [Tireless] badge are actually terrible. They reward a certain type of behaviour at the expense of another. For [Unsung Hero] it means that I am no longer allowed to work in high profile tags.

It is rewarding people who have blinders on. It does not encourage high-profile users to help out the low view areas, it rewards people who are already behaving that way.

Suggestion

If you want actionable suggestions for other badges.

• [Elbow Grease]: Answer with +3 on a question with < 100 views
• [In The Trenches]: 20 answers with +3 on questions with < 100 views
• [Archaeologist]: Answered a question more than 100 days old with more than +3 (on answer)
• [Curator]: Answered 20 questions more than 100 days old with more than +3 (on answer)
• [Shaman?]: Accepted Answer on 20 questions not in the top 50 tags.
• [Pilgrimage]: Accepted Answer on 50 questions not in the top 50 tags.

Now, if any of these were suggested individually as badges, I'd be among the first to find flaw (I'm unceasingly negative). But at least there would be a discussion with possibility for improvements.

Answer 3

For me, the Real "Unsung Heroes" are somewhere in this set:

User Link                  Zero Score Answers Non Zero Score Answers Reputation 
-------------------------- ------------------ ---------------------- ---------- 
Hans Passant               224                1278                   69265      
CommonsWare                201                635                    33578      
Nick Craver                181                1182                   54208      
Darin Dimitrov             180                1165                   75062      
Pascal Thivent             177                1204                   72814      
marc_s                     173                1174                   72178      
BalusC                     156                1228                   65100      
tvanfosson                 148                1315                   113772     
Gumbo                      142                897                    72061      
Craig Stuntz               137                603                    37645      
AnthonyWJones              133                608                    43347      
John Saunders              127                578                    50794      
Marc Gravell               118                2242                   151137     
VonC                       114                1091                   87438      
SLaks                      111                1146                   62973      
bobince                    109                982                    70118      
Pekka                      106                914                    52537      
KennyTM                    104                722                    45356 

These folks have 100+ accepted answers with a zero score.

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UPDATE:

I regularly answer questions tagged google-maps on Stack Overflow. These questions do not attract a lot of views and upvotes, and when answers are upvoted, it is often the OP upvoting it while accepting it. With a low rate of upvotes, it is also very difficult to obtain the silver tag badge (relative to other popular tags).

2nd UPDATE:

The same thing happens when users regularly answer long and complicated questions that many others don't even bother to read, let alone verify and upvote the answers. I'm not surprised to see the names of a few brave heroes in the above list. Most of them are familiar names as @random noted below, but weren't they unsung on those 100+ unrecognized answers? Why does the ratio matter?

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Shouldn't this badge encourage contribution to the situations mentioned above? Or did I totally misunderstand the motivation behind this badge?

Answer 4

I agree. 25% is too much. But totally 10 is to easy for a gold badge. Maybe increase it to 25 or 50 zero scored accepted answers and drop the 25% of total requirement.

Answer 5

It looks like these (Tireless/Unsung Hero) are not badges you should be striving to attain - they are awarded as a token of appreciation/inspiration/consolation to folks who are frustrated that their efforts go unnoticed by the community.

That said, I believe the cutoff of 10 for a gold badge is too low. 10 for the silver and 25 for gold would be fair enough.

And above all, the percentage requirement should be brought down to 17.08 aka 55/322 - I missed the silver version by 10 answers according to latest data dump ;)

Answer 6

25% seems far too high. The more questions you answer, the less likely it is that you will ever attain this badge. A good argument to this case is that nobody only one person over 10k has the badge on any of the trilogy sites:

https://stackoverflow.com/badges/226/unsung-hero
https://serverfault.com/badges/84/unsung-hero
https://superuser.com/badges/59/unsung-hero

Nobody has the badge at all on meta.

It's going to be very difficult for anyone with a lot of accepted answers and active in a popular tag to ever get this badge, it seems far more likely that you'd achieve it within the early stages of joining the sites, e.g. on your 10th answer ;-)

I think Sanoj has the right idea - 50 accepted answers with 0 score would be a lot tougher. It would certainly less obtainable to new users. If the percentage requirement has to stay, I think a better balance is needed.

EDIT: mostly because I'm bored of my work, I decided to do some jQuery work via Google Chrome's console and worked out that the average rep of users on SO with this badge is 2981.5968992248063 - not counting the suspended user with 1 rep.

Answer 7

I don't think the criteria are out of line.

What I think everyone is objecting to is the fact that the badge was recently introduced, and awarded based on current data, not retroactively.

It will be nearly impossible to get the badge now as a higher-rep user, while it is possible we would have gotten it at some point in the past.

If the badge is awarded to all users who would have qualified for it at the time, then I think that should make everyone happy. Even if you don't get the badge, that is a fair solution for everyone.

Answer 8

I disagree - the 25% rate of unmarked questions is a GOOD starting point.

It is a gold badge to reward you when you answer the more obscure questions that don't get a lot (or any) upvotes, or you answer questions for people who have insufficient rep to upvote. Its payback for hanging out where the upvote fairies fear to tread.

My interpretation of the proposal was that it wasn't there to be earnt - in fact it may be almost impossible to get deliberately.

Personally I also think the minimum question limit is too low, it should be 20, 30, maybe even 40. Gold badges shouldn't be cheapened by just handing them out willy nilly.

Disclaimer: i have the silver version, i just missed out on the gold (roughly 23% ratio). Even so i think the gold is set too low, and i think the silver is set way too low (should probably be bronze).