Should we unpin the accepted answer from the top of the list?

Question

Community manager Nicholas Chabanovsky has posted this on Meta Stack Exchange:

Unpinning the accepted answer from the top of the list of answers.

On Stack Overflow, apparently, answers are now by default sorted by score, with the accepted answer appearing wherever its score places it, instead of being pinned to the top.

The linked question asks whether we would like to have the same behaviour on our site, or stick with the old way of having the accepted answer appear at the top of the list regardless of its score (or, I guess, something else entirely).

What are your thoughts on this?

This question is about the main site, Ask Ubuntu. For the same question with regard to meta, see my other question.

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I have posted feedback on this discussion in answer to Nicholas Chabanovsky's question

Answer 1

Accepts are a way to indicate what worked best for the OP or which answer they personally liked. Sometimes the OP's choice isn't the best one - after all, many people ask questions because they don't know much about the topic, so they can't necessarily be expected to be a good judge. Also, sometimes better answers are posted later after the OP has stopped interacting with the question or no longer has the ability to test solutions.

The score of a post gives a more reliable indication of its quality, as potentially more (and possibly more knowledgeable) people are involved in determining it.

Therefore, I think we should have the accepted answer sort according to score, rather than being pinned to the top.

For anyone interested, here's an SEDE query for posts where the accepted answer is outscored by another answer (according to this, on Ask Ubuntu there are around 9000 such posts).

Answer 2

Obsolete Answer Flag

In many cases the answer with the most upvotes is simply the one that has been here longest. Often these high vote answers are totally obsolete and no longer work.

It was much easier to get votes in the old days, when Ask Ubuntu was new and unique. Answers did not need to be very good to get lots of upvotes.

There should be an obsolete flag so that users can flag these old and obsolete answers to drop them from the top of the list. A flagged answer does not need to be totally removed, just dropped to the bottom of the page where it won't hurt anyone. It should probably take a vote of five flags to demote an answer.

Closing a duplicate question and then linking an old question with 20 obsolete answers wastes the users time and does not give users much confidence in Ask Ubuntu.

Some people talk about historical value of these answers but people come here to get help making their Ubuntu work, not history lessons.

Lets keep Ask Ubuntu relevant and up to date.

Answer 3

From my limited experience looking for solutions (especially programming related on Stack Overflow), I have noticed that the accepted answers are not generally useful for my case. This could be due to different versions of software used by the original questioner and newer features have been built over the time, which makes the accepted answer less useful for my situation.

Fortunately, there are multiple other people having similar questions and some of them have posted their own working solutions which have been helpful for me. It was interesting to note that these newer updated answers have way more upvotes than the accepted answer. I reckon unpinning the accepted answer will help us find our solution faster -- a few minutes earlier at least.

The argument that OP will be responsible enough to come back and check which answer is more useful and change their accepted answer does not seem to happen often. We have had multiple flags asking if mods can reassign accepted answers, because people rarely change their accepts even if a better answer has appeared.

Answer 4

Neither system is perfect. The problem with vote totals deciding the "best answer" (by sort order, at least) is that they are momentum that is hard to overcome in the event that things change. And with the age of some questions (on most of the Stack sites), a new answer can come along that makes much more sense today than the top voted answer of yesteryear. I've seen this happen multiple times in my relatively short time answering on Stack sites.

The ability of the OP to change the accepted answer based on new information is useful, and allows the new information to automatically get to the top, regardless of how many votes the old, outdated (often even now wrong) answer might have. Without this, the momentum is for readers to continue to read the highest voted answer, and often even upvote it again since it might seem to work for them.

Sure, it's a lot of "power" to give the OP, but someone needs to have the ability to "pin" an answer, IMHO, and who better than the person who asked it originally?

Vote totals, which are difficult to change after months or years, aren't always the best metric for the "best answer" -- Especially on older questions.

Answer 5

I am late as usual. But, Nicolas Chabanovsky, a community manager, said "before the end of September 19th". It is still 18th September according to UTC 😜.

I am not gonna discuss about the merits or demerits of unpinning the accepted answer. Other answers do a good job about them.

I am proposing to have a trial before coming to any conclusions. Since many people seem to support unpinning the accepted answer, let's have a trial of that for, let's say, 1 month or 3 months (or whatever time period which would be good). This will help us get a better picture.

If the impact of unpinning the accepted answer will be good, we can continue having accepted answers unpinned. If the impact of unpinning the accepted answer will be negative, we can change back to pinning the accepted answer.

^{But, I am not sure how we can assess the impact. (Maybe the moderators or community managers can assess the impact...)}

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Catija, a community manager, said this:

.... This should be a site setting that the CMs have access to and can change in a minute. Provided the request was status-reviewed on the child meta, I don't think this would take more than a day or two to change.

But since she mentioned "should be", I presume that this "setting" has not been created yet.

Meanwhile Anita Taylor, Product manager for the Public Platform team, said this:

The Public Platform team will go through these requests and determine what to prioritize, defer and decline. We ask for your patience -- key members of the team are on vacation over the next few weeks, so we won't be able to triage these requests until mid-to-late October.

Considering the fact that the triaging of requests will take time until mid-to-late October, I request the moderators to not remove the featured tag from the two posts such that more people will have look at these posts.

Also, our meta is not much active. So having a trial (and then coming to a decision) is better than directly coming to a final decision based on votes in meta.