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No, it's not you. This is just a natural consequence of Stack Overflow shifting the focus from a high quality library of knowledge towards quantity, e.g. attracting as many users as possible while at the same time driving away the people who used to curate the content and wrote good answers.
Looking at some stats, you should be lucky to still get any answers,...
answered Oct 28 '19 at 14:09
samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
3,4693 gold badges22 silver badges45 bronze badges
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This is a modified copy of my answer to the related question on Meta Stack Overflow.
status-deferred
Unpinning the accepted answer is a good change for the majority of SE sites I imagine.
However, I would still very much like a clear indication (near the top of the question) that an answer has been accepted and offer a link to jump to it. As it is now, when ...
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Full List of Community Discussions
✅ indicates that this has been implemented on the specific site.
Site
Verdict
Site Discussion Link
Academia
50/50
Should the answer that appears on "top" be the OP's "accepted answer" or the answer with most votes?
Anime
Does the community want the accepted answers to be pinned to the top?
Apple
...
51
Let's review a few things involved here:
A historical patch of reputation that wasn't real-time, when synced meaning bounty offers that would have required going negative.
A desire for a reputation timeline that never dips below 1.
A mechanism that adjusts reputation with an award amounting to the reputation not actually chronologically present when the ...
50
Stack Overflow is probably the site where the concept of accepted answers makes the most sense, and even there I think pinning the accepted answer is overall harmful in the end. For non-technical sites the accepted answer concept is often less meaningful simply because it is harder for the asker to evaluate answers, especially when the questions aren't about ...
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I agree with the change, thanks for doing this.
For users who want to keep the old behaviour, I've written a small userscript, Accepted Answer Pinner (direct installation link – Stack Apps post). It pins the accepted answer back on top, unless it's a self-answer that wouldn't qualify for pinning in the old situation.
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Not every moderator or high-rep user participates on Stack Exchange Meta, and not every hi-rep or engaged user participates on their child site.
Nevertheless, I think the option to unstick the accepted answer from its pole position should be discussed by each individual meta site. Please feature this post and communicate this proposal to all the moderators ...
31
I'm quite a new user on Stack Overflow but I already know what you mean. It can get really frustrating, especially when you donate 2h of your time and somebody doesn't show the smallest form of appreciation.
Today, when thinking about this I came up with an idea. What if every user could have a blacklist to which he/she could add the users who behave this ...
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The status quo of having the selected answer pinned in most cases is the best option under the current system for meta.
In some cases, it's critically important to have a specific answer pinned to the top. Without another alternative mechanism (and there are occasions where staff have had to do.... interesting... things, like change the ownership of a post, ...
29
If you actually found the correct answer, then please post it. I agree that in a niche tag like that it might not get many views right away, and therefore votes to correct, but it will alert the OP if he is still active on the site that there is a new answer, and he may change the accept. Also, eventually over time, many others will google and find that ...
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Stack Exchange is a pretty popular source of papers I think because we make so much of our data available for free. (Anecdotally, I met with a group from a local university who outright told me that's why they used the network for research.) When people contact us to let us know they are doing research, we've been happy to help. But often people don't ...
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Not every type of unwelcome activity is enumerated, but when you see a user flogging a feature or exploiting some use case wildly outside how it was intended to be used, it is abusive. And when that activity needlessly irritates users or becomes generally unpleasant, it's trollsome.
We do throttle a lot of these repetitive activities through the core code, ...
26
status-completed
Keep the accepted answer pinned on meta sites
Oftentimes, on meta sites, the behavior of pinning the accepted answer to the top is preferred:
Answers can be different opinions in a discussion, and accepting the one that is eventually the community's consensus or is the one that eventually gets implemented will make that fact clear to others ...
answered Sep 8 at 16:42
Sonic the Anonymous Hedgehog
76.3k15 gold badges141 silver badges323 bronze badges
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No, accepted answers should not be immune to downvotes.
There are incorrect accepted answers out there, and downvotes are the only means we have to reduce the visibility of those answers relative to correct but unaccepted ones.
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I stopped asking questions a few years back on Stack Overflow because:
My questions were no longer "easy" since I could both research myself as well as I've become a much better engineer in the last years. And hard/difficult questions don't get answered.
I got sick of people who clearly don't read my question "helping" by posting an "answer" that wastes my ...
23
Shouldn't voting down an accepted answer cost more reputation points?
No.
An incorrect accepted answer is even worse than an incorrect regular answer, because the accept mark suggests some form of authoritativeness.
Voting is the community's main mechanism to alert other users to the answer's incorrectness, and create an incentive for its author to fix it....
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(This was posted in response to the first version of the question and then edited after the question was revised once. It hasn't been updated for further revisions.)
There are three aspects to this (original) proposal:
accepted-answer stickiness
accepted-answer reputation
accepted-answer labeling (OP clarified in a comment that the intention is for the ...
23
Accepting the answer is entirely up to the asker - they can accept whichever answer solved their problem or answered their question best.
It may not be a popular answer, and it may even be entirely wrong, but that is what the Accept button is for - for them.
Scoring is the community rating of the post.
Personally I think the two things are very separate ...
22
Please let us know what you think will work best for your site! If you can discuss this question with your community it would be awesome.
We've already discussed this on Mi Yodeya. As of this writing, the question there is +12/−0 and the only answer is +10/−0; both ask for the accepted answer to be unpinned. So Mi Yodeya wants the accepted answer unpinned. ...
21
I'm beginning to think that you all have been poking around in my brain. As I've mentioned before, this problem has been in front of me lately and I've yet to come up with solution that has been accepted internally.1, 2
FWIW, I've suggested a variety of things, internally, to "unpin" accepted answers from the top spot, including limiting it to those that ...
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I have also seen these types of comments many times.
Since the "upvote" buttons tend to be more easily understood than the checkmark (i.e. most users who comment "How do I accept?" also mention that they have attempted to upvote, as in the screenshot above), I would recommend the following solution be implemented:
When a user who doesn't have sufficient ...
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As with most questions of etiquette, it depends largely on the situation. Think of it like a waiter asking for a tip vs. informing a tourist that it is customary to tip waiters in the region.
In the first case it seems a bit presumptuous, perhaps the waiter wasn't very good and didn't really deserve a tip, or perhaps the waiter was good but the customer ...
20
Because Stack Overflow Is a Problem/Solution sort of website, the OP of a question is uniquely qualified to select a Solution because he or she is the one who is actually facing the problem.
Most of the early votes on answers come from other potential answerers, who are not actually facing the problem, but are offering a solution.
They cannot verify ...
answered Dec 30 '13 at 18:32
Sam I am says Reinstate Monica
11.3k1 gold badge29 silver badges49 bronze badges
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status-declined
I'll throw in what I suggested on Politics SE: A hybrid model. Acceptance indicates that "this answer is what the asker was looking for." On Politics, that can range from "I feel informed" to "This confirms my political beliefs so I like it."
Even so, I think acceptance still has value, but shouldn't be the end-...
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I would be against this, since that would actually have blocked me from posting my first answer.
For me at the least the reason I originally registered on stack overflow was because I had found a solution to a problem but that accepted solution was in fact wrong (or at least limited to a specific case). This prompted me to write my own answer, correcting ...
19
You can't, because... there isn't a solution posted.
To be clear, we don't have a thing that marks a question as "solved." We have a thing for marking the accepted solution. These are not the same thing.
If you've solved it yourself, great! Consider sharing the answer with us and accepting it to show us your accepted solution, so that other people in your ...
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To start with, in my experience this reason given in one of the posts referenced is just wrong:
The asker has decided it works
In my opinion and going on my own experience (mostly on SO), OP doesn't always test the solution provided. And if they did, they often pick the first, highest-voted or shortest answer (usually all three of them). Often that ...
19
I think what they should do is make it so that whenever a post is closed and the owner has less than 50 reputation, the accepted answer is automatically unaccepted and the asker cannot reaccept it. Basically, what I mean is making "having accepted answers to closed questions that are closed" a privilege awarded at 50 or so reputation.
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible