Should accepted answers still be pinned to the top of the list of answers?

Question

There's a proposal on main Meta regarding accepted answers floating to the top in the list of answers. I'll selectively quote parts of CM Nicolas Chabanovsky's question here to get you up to speed with the specifics of the discussion:

Today we changed the way we sort answers on Stack Overflow. We no longer pin the accepted answer (with the green checkmark) to the top of the list of answers. By default, we now sort strictly by votes (descending order by highest score), and the accepted answer's order in the list is based on its score.

We can change the way the engine sorts answers in site settings. We would like to hear from you all if it is something you want to see on your site. (Please let me acknowledge in advance that we will not be able to run a test on each site.)

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 are going to collect feedback before the end of September 19th.

How does the Politics community feel about accepted answers floating to the top? Should we follow Stack Overflow's lead of sorting by answer score only?

Feel free to use the answer box here to share specific concerns about answer sorting on Politics. If you want to discuss specifics about the new way of answer sorting then it's probably best to reply to Nicolas' question on main Meta.

Sept 29th 2021 Update

Given the consensus below that accepted answers should be unpinned, this has now been implemented on the Politics Stack.

Answer 1

I looked at the data a bit using this SEDE query. There are 704 questions where the accepted answer is outscored by another answer. In 486 questions the difference in score between the accepted answer and the highest scoring answer is at least 3.

Of those questions where the accepted answer is outscored, in 28 cases the accepted answer has a negative score.

As such, I also think it makes sense to score answers based on score only. While it doesn't happen that often, it prevents askers from prominently featuring a poor answer at the top.

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The following query shows questions where the highest scoring answer was accepted and there's at least one other answer. This yields 3122 unique questions. The score difference between the accepted answer and the second highest scoring answer ranges from 0 to 186.

In 191 cases the accepted answer has the same score as another answer. Ties are also addressed in a feature-request on main meta which asks that the accepted answer is shown above other answers with the same score.

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Let's address another concern that the non-accepted highest scoring answer (i.e. the answer that is not on top now, but will be after the change) is more controversial than the accepted answer. To measure controversy, I will simply use the downvote count.

Using this query, I found that there are 50 such* questions where the highest scoring answer has strictly more downvotes than the accepted answer. There are only 16 *such questions where the highest scoring answer has 4+ downvotes more than the accepted answer.

* such questions being those where the highest scoring answer has a strictly higher score than the accepted answer.

Answer 2

I like the idea of going by score only as for the most part the accepted answer will have the highest score. However there will be times when an answer is accepted because it was what the OP wanted to hear even if it might not be a good answer.

Answer 3

I feel like there should be ('should' is a funny word) a hybrid model here which weights the accepted answer as higher scoring than it's actual votes, but does not automatically pin that response. For the reasons discussed, bias and low quality can appear in both accepted and high-scoring responses. SE's model is a little optimistic about human interaction, but to my mind it hits more than it misses.

I feel like a higher scoring answer that manages 125%+ of the votes on the accepted answer should be allowed to dislodge the OP's preference - especially on a site like Politics where askers aren't usually solving a practical problem and so identifying the answer that got them through their impasse doesn't happen so much.

Answer 4

I'm not sure that unpinning is really needed here. Answers on politics rarely become "outdated" like they do on SO and the other technical sites, especially not on the same time scales.

Yes, there are lots of cases where there are answers with more votes than the accepted answer, but I don't think that's actually evidence of needing unpinning, but rather is exactly why pinning was done in the first place. If the goal had always been to have the answer with the most votes at the top, there would never have been a reason to develop the pinning feature.

There are a couple of reasons (both of which are somewhat common on this site) why an accepted answer might have fewer votes than a non-accepted one, even if the accepted one really is better quality:

Lower quality answers posted sooner

It's common to get short, so-so answers posted rather quickly after a question is posted. Since SE tends to give more visibility to more recently-posted questions, these will typically attract significantly more upvotes than if the same answer had been posted at the same time as all of the others. And this tendency is magnified by the score sorting resulting in these answers appearing at the top. This effect doesn't actually reflect answer quality at all, but rather just how quickly the answer was posted. Especially when a lot of such answers get posted on a question, this also commonly means that much better quality answers posted a day or two later get few, if any, votes, due to being buried by the sort underneath all of the older ones that already have votes.

The dreaded HNQ effect

When questions hit the Hot Network Questions, they tend to a attract a lot of views while they're on HNQ, very many of which are from users who have no reputation on this site and, thus, can upvote, but cannot downvote. When this happens, answers tend to get a lot of "this agrees with my biases" upvotes, even if the answer isn't particularly good quality (or even if it's just outright wrong.) This is also a problem on Skeptics and other SE sites that tend to get a lot of controversial topics about which people have strong (but not always well-informed) opinions. This commonly leads to poor answers having high scores, as everyone coming from HNQ can upvote them, but only people with sufficient reputation on this site can downvote them.

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In both of the above cases, pinning the accepted answer to the top can give more visibility to better answers than ones that may have more votes. In the case of answers that were posted later, but accepted while the question was still relatively active, pinning the accepted answer can also lead to a newer, better-quality answer eventually outscoring the older ones, which often wouldn't happen if it were buried underneath the existing answers.

I do agree that there are cases on this site where the OP selects an answer that is just what they want to hear rather than actually being the best answer, but it is my experience that both of the above cases happen far more frequently here than that.

It would be nice if SE had a better, more nuanced approach to sorting available, but, given only the options of pinning or not pinning, I personally lean toward leaving the pinning. Neither solution is perfect by any means, but, especially on sites where answers don't really become "outdated" often, I do think that pinning the accepted answer solves more problems than it creates.

Answer 5

Yes

Changing the ordering messed the order on several of my questions, e.g. this, this, this and this, and I genuinely question if any of the accepted answers are actually worse than the highest upvoted one. At least one (2nd link above) is even obviously better, since the highest upvoted answer was edited to say they answered a slightly different, less clear version of the question.