Do we want to unpin the accepted answer from the top?

Question

There is a on going Meta SE post about unpinning the accepted answers on a post from the top of the list of answers. In fact, Stack Oveflow has already unpinned the accepted answers.

For Stack Overflow, there are good reasons behind the change. As a developer, I'll often see older questions on Stack Overflow that have answers that are outdated due to program languages changing overtime, thus at the time the question was originally answered and said answer was accepted, it may no longer be valid/the best practice in the present time. At the same time, someone may have posted an updated and valid answer that has received more votes that would be buried down below the outdated accepted answer simply because it has the green check mark.

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But does this make sense on our site? You decide!

SE has two scenarios laid out, but only one of the following will be done (quoted from the linked Meta):

Currently we are planning to move forward with one of two scenarios, based on your feedback:

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

Thus, do we (Arqade) want to keep the accepted answers pinned to the top, or do we want to unpin them?

Note: SE plans to collect feedback before the end of September 19th.

Answer 1

One thing to keep in mind is that in a lot of cases, there is also the possibility that an accepted answer is actually the NEWER answer, which takes into account new information or applies to a more recent client version.

I modified Wondercricket's query from the comments to account for dates, and in roughly half of the roughly 3000 queries that have the highest answer having more votes than the accepted answer, the accepted answer is the more recent answer that most likely contains additional information or corrects outdated information.

So my vote is AGAINST unpinning accepted answers, because in our context, our users tend to reassign their accepted answers to account for outdated information quite often, and after checking a bunch of the questions in Wondercricket's query (not all 3000, I do NOT have the time for that), I've found that often times, it's simply the newest answer that is most accurate, regardless of whether it's accepted or not.

Speculation: IN THEORY, it might be better to show the highest voted answer by default, UNLESS the accepted answer is significantly more recent than the highest answer. However, I doubt Stack Overflow will go that way.

Answer 2

I think accepted answers should be unpinned. While we may not see this issue as much as Stack Overflow, I have certainly seen cases where the accepted answer is no longer the best answer, or even is outright wrong, but is still the first answer anyone sees when they visit the question.

While accepting an answer is important, votes are a better indicator of how useful the answer is to the most people, not just the person who asked the question.

Answer 3

With games-as-a-service being the industry trend I would vote to unpin accepted answers from the top.

Constant changes to games will see to it that even solid answers from the past can be quickly outdated.

Answer 4

At the time of making this post:

Summary of votes on the answers on this post (excluding answers that don't distinctly state a side):

Post	Keep Pin/Unpin?	Total Votes	Positive	Negative
Nzall's	Keep Pin	16	15	1
SaintWacko's	Unpin	12	9	3
childe's	Unpin	5	4	1
Robotnik's	Unpin	5	3	2
Schism's	Keep Pin	1	0	1

Net Votes (Total Positive for all related Posts - Total Negative for all related Posts):

Votes To Keep Pin	Votes to Unpin
13	10

While using the votes as a way of gauging the community consensus isn't the most accurate way to go about this (people could vote on multiple posts), it does provide some insight.

Since there doesn't seem to be an extreme towards either proposal, it seems that leaving the accepted answer pinned is what the majority of the community wants. Should we want to change this in the future, we should be able to by making a request out to SE Community Managers.

Thank you all for participating!

Answer 5

Something not really taken into account is that the highest scoring answer is sometimes not the best/correct answer either. It could be well written but objectively wrong, it could be outdated, or higher scoring by virtue of being posted earlier.

For cases where the OP is still active, this will remove their ability to 'pin' the most up to date answer by way of moving the checkmark to the new 'correct' answer.

Having said all that, my vote is still yes, it should be turned off by default. In the general case, a highly-voted answer is more likely to be useful to more people, and we have other avenues (comments, flags, post notices, deletion) to deal with highly-voted, incorrect or outdated answers.

Additionally, (and for any SE employee reading this): personally I would like to see "Always show the accepted answer above other answers" as an option that can be enabled at the profile-level. This would give users the ability to control it themselves, in much the same way we can choose to dim or hide ignored tags.

Answer 6

I vote to continue pinning the accepted answer to the top.

Several answers describe the case where the question asker is inactive and does not change the accepted answer. While not ideal, I don't think this is too much of an issue: the top-voted answer, if more relevant, will be the second answer in the list.

However, in the case where the question asker is active, and updates the accepted answer, unpinning would result in the new "best" answer being arbitrarily low on the list of answers by score. Allowing the asker to pin the newest answer allows it to be promoted immediately.

In other words, I think the worst case when we unpin the accepted answer is much worse than the worst case when we leave it pinned.

Answer 7

Maybe have it on a tag-by-tag basis with it on by default?

For example, if someone tags a question with minecraft-java-edition || minecraft-bedrock-edition, it stays on because, as SaintWacko mentioned, the game updates frequently and has had & will do various changes.

Meanwhile, something like final-fantasy-15 is not being worked on anymore, so it's pretty probable that the accepted answer to a question about the game will stay correct in the future. Not that this couldn't cause problems, mind you, specially when it comes to technical questions.