Accepted Answer?
In SomeOther systems, there is an easy way to mark an Answer as the "accepted answer". I don't see an obvious way to do that here. Is there a way? If not, should there be?
3 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
It strikes me that there was something contrary to the stated aims of Stack Overflow about the accepted answer button. SO set out not to provide an answer to one individual but to create a permanent collection of questions and answers that would be valuable to many people. Given this, what is the point of giving the original asker a super vote? If the answers are supposed to serve multiple people with the same problem, what special status does the first asker have to bless a particular answer?
The point of a social proof system is that the best answer is proved by accumulating the most votes. Not a perfect system, but it has its merits. But it is compromised if the person who asks the question is given a super vote. And we see this all the time, low vote questions accepted by the original asker, either because they accepted too soon before a better answer was posted, or they did not like the best answer for some reason.
It seems to me that there are three reason to upvote an answer:
I tried the solution provided and it worked.
I am an expert (or think I am) and I agree with this answer.
I have heard this answer before and assume it is correct.
Now it seems to me that there are two kinds of validation here, experience and agreement, and that they have distinct value as social proof. The accepted answer button is (tacitly and inexactly) a tried it and it worked vote. A regular upvote could be either.
If you wanted to distinguish two kinds of up votes:
- It worked!
- I agree!
You could, but they should apply equally for all voters. The asker should not have a privileged It worked! button. If the answer is for everyone, anyone for whom that answer worked should be able to cast an It worked! vote.
I'm not sure if having two distinct kinds of up vote would work, or if people would respect the difference. But this strikes me as capturing the difference between an accepted answer button and a regular upvote, and if you want to preserve the distinction between It worked! and I agree! then both vote types should be available to everyone.
Let me refer you to a forum thread on the subject, from when we were defining what we wanted this project to look like.
It's not the most clear-cut thread ever, but I surmise that the plan is to have some sort of author acceptance. How exactly it works and whether it's similar to SE or our own take on it isn't yet defined, but we'll hammer that out when we get to developing it.
We need to flesh this out, but the idea I have in my head, and that I recall discussing on the forum thread (which I haven't gone back and reread yet), is that in addition to votes we'll allow people to add reactions like "this worked" (and maybe a few others TBD). These would be public, unlike votes, would be displayed with the answer, and would have no other effect. The asker is free to indicate that more than one answer worked; people who aren't the asker are free to signal that something worked for them. We're not aiming for this in the "1.0" (MVP) release, but it's something we want to look at after.
The same mechanism would allow experts (or people who claim to be experts) to indicate "this is dangerous", at the cost of having to own that. That's not likely to come up on Writing but could come up on a Chemistry site, for example.
These reactions would be purely informative, and it's up to the reader to evaluate them including considering who left them. I wouldn't want to automatically enable them on sites that don't benefit from them, but it's a possibility for later.
But, to go back to Mark's point, the original asker of the question doesn't get special status here, and certainly we don't want to grant one person the ability to change the sort order. The whole point of community voting is community assessment.
0 comment threads