New Badge: Hard Question

Question

I would like to propose the following badge:

This would be given to the users whose question gets 15* up-votes before receiving the first answer.

EDIT: An alternativ to this could be that the badge is won if the users receives X number of up-votes before he receives an answer that is up-voted Y number of times. Thanks @belisarius for the comment!

^{The last may avoid childish behavior, since otherwise it would be in basically everyone's hand to avoid you getting that badge, a quick nonsense answer could spoil it for you too.}

Take a look at the query that @Benjol made to the database, this may help you make up your mind for or against this badge request. See: Answer and Query.
Thanks Benjol!

I think I would be a good prize for, a clearly good question asker with a (community judged) hard to answer but very interesting question.

The disadvantages (I can see) is that it maybe it will encourage difficult questions (as opposite to good ones - since hard can be good). I don't think this would be a serious issue since basically it will encourage people to make up-votable questions rather that un-answerable ones.

That said, in my opinion, it is still think it will be a nice price for a an apparently great question in a very particular situation due to the normal speed of responses.

Keep in mind that everything from the name of the badge, the amount of up-votes, if it's bronze/silver/gold is just a suggestion by a very imagination-wise limited human being, everything is completely open to suggestion.

So, what do you think?

^{*I would have suggested 10 but then every time you won this one, you would have won the nice question too, maybe 10 points is almos impossible and badge should be gold or maybe it should be 5 votes, up to you.}

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Pushing it a bit harder, a "Impossible Question" (silver/gold) could be a follow up to this badge, with say 25 up-votes.

Answer 1

Hard questions don't generally get heavily up-voted, so I'm not sure what this behavior would measure.

Bikeshed questions get a lot of up-votes but they also typically get equally many answers. So maybe trivial or funny questions that get a flurry of heh-heh votes but not interesting enough to contribute to? Either way, I don't imagine your criteria would result in a "hard question" badge.

There's never been a good measure for "hard questions" on Stack Overflow. Difficulty is very relative.

Answer 2

It would appear that there are thirty-eight questions which meet the following criteria:

• 15 or more upvotes
• No accepted answer
• Not closed
• No answers with more that two upvotes

Of which, SEDE shows two having no answers at all, but they've both been answered since.

Here's the sql, and here's the query.

select Q.Id as [Post Link], Q.Score from Posts Q
where Q.Score >= 15
and Q.PostTypeId=1
and Q.ClosedDate is null
and Q.AcceptedAnswerId is null
and not exists (select A.Id from Posts A where A.Score >= 2 and A.ParentId = Q.Id)
order by Q.Score desc

Note that this query doesn't take into account questions which at some point in their past would have been candidates.

Answer 3

Another measure for this that might be worth considering is the number of times the question has been starred as a favourite.

I've noticed that starring as a favourite is a somewhat under-used facility on SO, but where it is used, it's typically because someone has seen a question that they don't know the answer to, and which doesn't already have a good answer but they would be interested in seeing an answer if/when it comes.

It seems to me that given the above, a heavily favourited question would very likely be considered hard. Perhaps in conjunction with the criteria already suggested, this could be used to mitigate against the false-positives that some of the other answers here have been warning against.

Answer 4

Given that a query has been run and it's been determined that 38 questions exist where this badge could be awarded, I like the idea. I think it should be a "gold badge", though.

but I don't think such a badge necessarily encourages good behavior. To the contrary, it might compel users to ask inconsequential, but intentionally difficult questions to receive the badge.

My logic could be debated, but given the criteria you set forth (15 up votes without an answer) achieving this badge will be difficult. I would be curious if anyone could run a query and find out how many questions fall in that category...

Difficult questions are often difficult to understand and answer correctly; they're not necessarily difficult to answer. People will invariably attempt to answer such questions without fully understanding them. Difficult questions also encourage a level of discussion for clarification, which can also lead to answers, incomplete, correct, or otherwise.

The final hurdle is, well, in my time on SO, I've only asked one question out of 125 that garnered more than 10 votes (12). It may say more about me than the voting system, but I think that's a difficult landmark to reach without an answer.