Unpinning the accepted answer

Question

It seems that Stack Overflow is getting a change and is no longer going to pin the accepted answer at the top and will now default to sorting by post score alone. In the post announcing this they posted a question asking how this should apply to other sites. Below are the choices being given and I was wondering how others thought we should tackle this.

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

Unpin the accepted answer on all SE sites by default and pin it back on a few sites that ask us to do so.

Keep the accepted answer pinned on all SE sites by default and unpin it on a few sites that ask us to do so.

Here are some stats about what questions would be impacted on our site. This comes from a query I got from another meta site question.

We have 8 questions with an accepted answer having a negative score and another answer with a higher score.

https://data.stackexchange.com/boardgames/query/1457490/questions-where-negatively-scored-accepted-answers-is-outscored#resultSets.

We have 220 questions with an answer that has a score at least 3 higher than the accepted answer.

https://data.stackexchange.com/boardgames/query/1457505/questions-where-accepted-answers-dont-have-the-highest-score-by-at-least-3-votes

We have 469 questions with an answer that has a higher score than the accepted answer.

https://data.stackexchange.com/boardgames/query/1457440/questions-where-accepted-answers-dont-have-the-highest-score

Update:

It appears we are going to need to make a request if we want this to happen on our site.

Start a meta discussion on your per-site meta.

When the discussion is completed and the community agrees to change the default behaviour (agrees to unpin the accepted answer), please ask one of the site moderators to add the status-review tag to the question. It will generate a ticket and let CMs know that we need to adjust the site setting for your site.

We would appreciate it if you add the outcome of the discussion to the accepted answer in this question. This will allow all of us to see the full picture.

Answer 1

I would strongly support making this change. The elevation of the accepted answer is primarily valuable in situations where the asker is in a unique position to evaluate the answer differently than any other voter. In particular, when questions are about the asker describing a problem that they face and answers are about solving that problem, only the asker can know whether their original problem has been solved.

This very rarely applies to our site. Most of the questions I see are about understanding rules of games, and in those cases other users with more knowledge about the game are better able to evaluate the correctness of answers.

In addition, the linked meta post links to a Stack Overflow Meta post describing an experiment that shows that even Stack Overflow itself, a site that is more focused on problem solving, not elevating accepted answers produces an improved experience. That's what prompted them to make this change in the first place.

Answer 2

On Stack Exchange the asker can actually test out the answer they were given and see if it solves their problem, here however those who ask questions often have no where to go to see if the answer was right or works, aside from other users on the site. We're also dealing with games where the rules can change over time, like this question where the accepted answer was correct at the time, but is now wrong in some ways. While an asker can change the accepted answer (and the answer can be edited when it's out of date), this doesn't always happen.

I support this change for these and many other reasons, across the entire stack exchange platform as a whole, but even more for our corner of it. A wrong answer shouldn't be permanently highlighted because the user who accepted it no longer exists or has simply abandoned their account - and allowing newer correct answers to rise past the old accepted answer provides a mechanism for that.

I do think that an accepted answer should still be involved in the ordering process - but as a tie-breaker, in essence equal to ½ of an upvote for the order of answers before the random sorting takes over. And there should be exceptions, particularly for meta sites where SE staff answers actually set or explain policy, but that's a case for a separate tool for forcing specific important answers to the top before either accepted or vote based ordering gets involved at all.

Answer 3

I'm against this in general. Sometimes a better answer is simply written later, which leads to it having fewer upvotes. Here's an example.

OP should get to decide what answer solves their problem. If the answer is bad or wrong, downvote it; the blurring out should make it clear to others that they should probably look at a different answer.