I understand the idea behind showing a users "accept rate" when they post a question, which is to encourage people to accept answers to their questions but it seems like it can/will encourage unwanted behavior as well. This unwanted behavior would be:
In an ideal world, these behaviors wouldn't exist but there is no such thing as an ideal world.
The accept rate has a lot of problems I can think up right away:
A better metric would be for Stack Overflow to estimate what a 'reasonable' user should do for each question. Questions with a lot of answers or a high voted answer should definitely have one of them accepted. Questions with no activity are less likely to have an accepted answer. Then you combine this information to classify the user into much fuzzier boxes like "over-accepter", "normal", "under-accepter".
Point #2 is sort of a feature, and one of the reasons we implemented this. Answerers have a right to know if the asker has a sub-10% accept rate before participating in the question.
Now, let's put on our "game theory" hats. How could one improve his or her accept rate percentage, by any means necessary?
As for point #1 -- if users accept an answer that is obviously wrong or incorrect, that makes them look bad, and will be reflected in the voting and comments. Since we operate on what is effectively a prestige system, I don't think this will be a serious issue.
Remember that any accepted answer rate of 70% or higher is great, and I'd consider anything at 50%+ plenty sufficient to indicate that the user is reasonably engaged. It's only a problem when the rate gets to 30% or lower, and for the real problem users, it's closer to 0%.
Since the accept rate was added to the display, I've had several accepted answers on old questions. While I don't consider my own answers to generally be harmful, I'm still somewhat worried by it. Take this one for example. Useless tongue-in-cheek answer because I figured the question would be closed anyway, suddenly accepted yesterday.
It makes me wonder what else people are choosing to accept, just to reach 100% accept rate. I myself felt the urge to accept an answer on a question, even though the answer did not help solve my problem. I thought about deleting the question altogether for a moment as well :P
Sure, it is sometimes annoying if you take a lot of time to answer a question to the best of your ability to find that nobody else is taking the time to attempt to understand the question. Not a single point from upvotes, and the poster seems to completely forget about the question as well. Still, I'm beginning to think that I'd prefer having no points over this artificially boosted accept rate.
I'm wondering how the accept rate is calculated anyway. I have asked 7 questions on Stack Overflow. One has no answers at all, and one has only a single answer that wasn't very helpful. I've accepted an answer on the other 5. My accept rate is 80%. Neither 5/6 nor 5/7 is very close to 80%. I've accepted my own answer on 1 question, but that still doesn't explain the 80%?
Valid points here. It appears that this feature was, in part, implemented in response to my question here so I feel slightly responsible for it's presence.
It's not what I was asking for, and while I can see that some people think it's useful I have my doubts along the same lines as Scott.
My idea was to have it only on the users profile where it could be seen in relation to the number of answers provided as obviously 100% of 5 answers is somewhat different to 50% of 100 answers (or indeed questions).
Given one of the comments on my question I can see Scott's second point being particularly pertinent.
Everything you do will be another avenue of unwanted behaviour.
The real question is, does the bad behaviour outweigh the good behaviour that it promotes?
Due to the fact that none of the answers are good enough I have so far deleted one question and answered 2 of my questions my self, so I could accept answers.
However I have also revisited some old questions and accepted a good answer.
But I have had to choose between two equally good answers on some questions just so I could accept one answer.
Point one will be eliminated by the votes in the long run. I do agree that certain people will be less inclined to answer a question by someone with a low acceptance rate, but it will also act as a motivator for people to accept answers which is a bigger issue at the moment.
There will always be pro's and con's with the changes intruduced into the Trilogy. It is the nature of communities.
If the system does get heavily abused, Jeff and the team will most likely put tools in place to allow the moderators to manage these abuses.
Ugh, I wondered what the huge influx of accepted answers today was. I will reserve judgement to see if it's useful or not, but in the short term, it is going to result in a huge influx of rep. to answerers.
The highlighting is wrong for the accept rate. I've answered 4/5 questions, the one unanswered one where there is honestly no satisfactory answer given. It's actually a pretty good accept rate, but for some reason, the accept rate is not green. I think the question is of more use with no accepted answer (indicating to people browsing that the issue is still unresolved), but the system is basically prodding me to accept an answer for every last question that I ask.
Jeff mentioned before that a 70% accept rate was "excellent" but I think the actual cutoff point for highlighting is > 80%.
I think that highlighting should only be done when you are sure that the accept rate is harmful: say, under 20 or 30%.
I've found that having the acceptance-rate reminds me to go accept answers to questions that I was holding off on, until more answers had come in. Every now and then I notice my acceptance-rate, and then I go catch up.
I think that the really problematic edge cases are not questions but users. Many questions will tend to average out over all users and just influence the average accept rate, which will just change the definition of a "good accept rate", and not really causing a problem unless someone is adamant that it must. be. 70%..
But then you will also end up with people who tend to do lots of research before asking questions, and consequently end up asking almost, or perhaps entirely, exclusively tough questions that there may not even be answers to.
And then it gets trickier: People will post answers to these questions that are best-guesses, but wrong, and people will upvote them because they are the closest thing to an answer for the question. This means that even a proposed scheme to base the percentage of acceptable questions on the number of upvotes to the answers of these questions won't necessarily work.
So the situation is that there's an unclear definition of a 'correct answer': does this mean "the definitive answer to the question" or just "the closest thing that we have to a correct answer"? Until this is clearly defined and agreed on by both the poster and the voters (for all possible values of poster and voter BP) it's very difficult to quantitatively assess whether someone is responsibly accepting correct answers.
A different, and perhaps more effective, tactic would be to provide a way for people flag a given answer as the correct one, and to show the percentage of those that exist for a given user. This is not foolproof either: for example, people may misunderstand the user's original question.
It seems appropriate, though perhaps impractically long-winded, to allow up- and down-voting on {the flagging of an answer as inappropriately non-accepted}. The question at that point becomes one of determining what the relevant level of precision is.
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Seems like getting 2 rep just isn't such a powerful motivator such that folks are going to keep a steady 100% accept rate. Then again, when your rep is as low as mine...
Is there a way to flag/change accepted answers that are clearly (harder than I make it sound) not very "answery"?
In any case, this seems like the worst solution, except for all the others. Smiley face.
