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

Question

Today, Stack Exchange changed the way answers are sorted on Stack Overflow, meaning that accepting an answer no longer pins it to the top (regardless of sorting method). It still has the green checkmark next to it, and accepting an answer is still exactly the same for the purposes of reputation, badges, green marker next to a question etc.

Stack Exchange are also asking the other sites in the network whether they'd like this behaviour or not, as this is now a site-configurable setting.

We've made noise before about removing or modifying the accept feature, as it doesn't exactly fit as intended with our site's goals, especially the part about a human accepting an answer that may be the wrong answer (or that may become outdated in the future). This isn't quite removing the accept feature, but it's a similar, milder step.

Therefore, should we request that accepted answer be unpinned on this site, or should we keep accepted answers pinned to the top?

Answer 1

Yes! Emphatically yes.

The accepted answer is rarely the most important answer. In part because often the accepted answer is out of date and thus not really even the best scoring, but more importantly because being the best scoring overall does not mean it is the cleverest, or most interesting. For code-golf it just means its the shortest answer from the handful of good golfing languages, which is not on it's own interesting.

Answer 2

Accepted answers should not be pinned

As mentioned in chat, it can be really nice to have the accepted answer pinned can be nice for things like KotHs or code-challenge questions with a definite winner, however I've personally seen accepted answers used much more often in things like code-golf challenges where there probably shouldn't be an accepted answer, whether it's from a new user or from an older challenge.

In a perfect world, the best thing would be for accepted answers to be pinned, and for us to only accept answers on challenges/questions that where it makes sense, such as KotHs, or questions on how to golf a specific piece of code. However, this isn't really feasible, since there are already so many code-golf challenges with accepted answers, as well as new users who don't know better.

In my opinion, given our circumstances, having accepted answers unpinned would be better for us overall, since the majority of our site and our policies are geared towards challenges where there is no "right answer," such as tips questions, or challenges where there is no one winner, since each language competes against its own type of language.

Answer 3

Accepted answers should be pinned

We rarely accept answers. Sometimes when an answer is accepted it's because it's on an old question and it was the shortest, but it's quite often used in challenges like KotHs to indicate which answer is winning.

The ability to accept an answer to pin it is useful for some types of challenges, and not overly harmful when misused. It's not great for old code golf challenges with accepted answers, but aside from a few those don't get much traffic anyway from users new enough to the site to not know how to vote.