It's no surprise to find a SO question where the accepted answer is not a very good answer, and the answer below it is up-voted substantially higher. Informally, I started calling this the underdog effect, where over time, an answer provided later surpasses the accepted answer while the accepted answer remains accepted. Presenting answers with lesser votes first and higher votes second alters user experience and culture over time. My first research interest was to determine how frequently this happens, which is 13.9% of the time. Running this query on the public Q4 2014 SO data dump:

  • Number of SO questions with accepted answers: 4,596,859
  • Number of underdogs: 639,269
  • Conclusion: 13.9% of all SO questions with accepted answers have an answer provided later (the underdog) which surpasses the votes of the accepted answer over time.

Ignoring the history and culture of SO, it seems odd to ask users to scroll more for higher-voted answers 13.9% of the time. Of course, this neglects questions like "are upvotes a good metric of quality?" and "what do users desire when viewing an SO questions?", but I'll leave those for another discussion. To be clear, this is not a prompt for SO to make any changes. Instead, I'm wondering: How could we address the underdog effect, while not significantly altering the Q&A culture of SO?


To arrive at the underdog findings, I downloaded the 100+GB stack exchange data set, loaded the SO dataset into a database, pre-optimized the data for queries, then queried the data. For fun, here are the top 3 most viewed underdog questions as of Q4 2014:

Below is graph of an example of an underdog answer on Add UITextField on UIView programmatically. Interactive plotly here. A sample Underdog Answer Pattern

Below is graph of a more complex underdog answer on Navigation in django. Interactive plotly here. enter image description here

  • 20
    Simple: abolish accepted answers! Well, maybe. As I mention in my answer at meta.stackexchange.com/a/214321/200582, sometimes the reason the accepted answer has fewer votes is that it was posted later on a question where inferior answers had already been highly upvoted, and the OP changed which answer was accepted to maximise the visibility of the recent, superior, but low-scored answer. I'm not sure whether this is more or less common than the case you describe. – Mark Amery Sep 27 '15 at 14:55
  • 4
    @MarkAmery this metric is only for solutions provided after the accepted solution – y3sh Sep 27 '15 at 15:05
  • 76
    The OP is in general the least technically competent of all the users that contribute to a Q+A. Nevertheless, as many as 6 out of 7 know how to pick the correct answer anyway. Even with the worst possible assumptions (not every outvoted accepted answer is guaranteed to be a wrong answer and not every googler only reads the accepted answer), SO is 86.1% effective at transferring knowledge to those who need it. That's pretty doggone good. – Hans Passant Sep 27 '15 at 15:13
  • 8
    @y3sh I doubt that's what Hans meant by technical competence. I think he means that, of the people involved in the Q&A, the OP probably knows the least about the subject because they asked the question in the first place. Whereas the answerers are likely more knowledgeable on the subject since they have the capacity to solve the problem. – ryanyuyu Sep 27 '15 at 16:11
  • 1
    That clarifies it. @HansPassant meant The OP in general, not The OP of this question. I'll delete my original comment about 3.1 out of 3.4 million users with a rep <= 100. – y3sh Sep 27 '15 at 16:14
  • 35
    While this is a neat observation and interpretation of data, I don't see any problem that needs addressing. – user4639281 Sep 27 '15 at 16:57
  • 3
    at the amount of stats points you used (over 600,000 and over 4,500,000) I feel it's safe to state that upvotes are good metric of quality. I would never use upvotes (as well as downvotes) to evaluate quality of single post, but your case, with that many stats, is totally different – gnat Sep 27 '15 at 17:03
  • 1
    User has sort tab options available to sort by votes ... not hard to bring most popular to the top – charlietfl Sep 27 '15 at 21:53
  • 3
    For the curious, would it be possible to include the queries you used to extract this data from Stack Exchange Data Explorer? – user456814 Sep 27 '15 at 22:09
  • 2
    I don't understand the problem. Can you expand your opening statements? – Lightness Races in Orbit Sep 27 '15 at 22:45
  • 2
    @Cupcake The query is too complex for the web explorer. But I'll show my work. First I loaded the data into mongo (goo.gl/FWvHVc). Then I created an underdog answer view (goo.gl/yZNE5N). Then I linked parent questions to their underdog answers (goo.gl/ANHLhl). Then I sat back and waited for the number of underdogs out of all answered questions (goo.gl/gMgC2p). And don't worry, the plotly passwords in the code don't work :D – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 1:02
  • 4
    Cool, I have an underdog answer. – BoltClock Sep 28 '15 at 3:34
  • 2
    It's also often the case that OP has a variation of a very general problem. OP accepts the answer that precisely targets his variation of the problem, and then hundreds of people facing a slightly more general version of the problem upvotes a more general solution. – aioobe Sep 28 '15 at 13:35
  • 2
    @DavidW, good point. I see lots and lots of Java answers that are new and approaches the problem using lambdas and and the stream API (Java 8 features). These answers are typically "trending" compared to the other older answers. When Java 8 is common place, these answers are definitely more valuable than the old Java <=7 answers. – aioobe Sep 28 '15 at 13:38
  • 5
    I would suspect that there are many false positives to the numbers in this as well. For example, stackoverflow.com/questions/194121/… has an accepted answer and a technically "underdog" answer. But the "underdog" answer is actually not solving the OP's problem. The reason the other one is upvoted is because that's likely what most of the people searching meant from the subject of the question. – teynon Sep 28 '15 at 18:28

12 Answers 12


The simple solution would be to treat accepted answers like bounties. Compare the two:

  • A bounty is a way for a specific person to award and bring attention to an answer, without disrupting the community consensus on what is the “best” answer

  • Accepting an answer should be a way for a specific person (the question asker) to award and bring attention to an answer, without disrupting the community consensus on what is the “best” answer

Note that this already happens in some cases. If you accept your own answer to your own question, your answer can fall below others if votes allow. This could be applied across the board. This community is built around the fact that questions are made to help more than 1 person:

  • You can vote on questions
  • You can vote on answers
  • You can bounty an answer

These are all tools available to people who were helped by an answer. Imagine the following scenario:

  • Accepted answer score: -1
  • Next answer score: 10
  • 10 people have viewed the question

Now with current mechanics, only 1/10 people saw the answer they should have seen first. How does that make sense? With a community like this it only makes sense to put the answer on top that is most likely to help the most people. Nothing is in place for stopping OP from purposely accepting a bad answer; making this site just a little worse in the process because we allow crap like that.

  • 21
    Many agree. It doesn't get any simpler than this. The main issue with the accept mark is that most readers treat it as community consensus. All because accepted answers by other users are pinned to the top. It doesn't matter if a subset of registered users are familiar with how it really works. If anything, it can hurt them. – BoltClock Sep 28 '15 at 3:36
  • 4
    It takes a bit for new users to figure out but the accepted answer serves the OP. Votes determine the worth to the community. I don't think anything needs to change. – Matt Sep 28 '15 at 13:24
  • 1
    @BoltClock what significant evidence is there that most readers treat it that way? Can you quantify "most"? – itsbruce Sep 28 '15 at 13:32
  • 7
    @itsbruce: Just empirical/anecdotal evidence, but I've come across more than a few "This should be the accepted answer" comments with dozens or hundreds of upvotes, accompanied by flags asking for removal of the accept mark, the answer, etc. If a non-trivial portion of users within the community are this misinformed about the accept mark, imagine how many drive-by readers who know nothing about our culture must see things the same way. – BoltClock Sep 28 '15 at 14:16
  • Maybe making the "acceptance" of an answer less prominent is an option? The "big green tick" is fairly "in your face", arguably drawing disproportionate attention to that answer. Maybe something more subtle (perhaps affecting the vote count: a box around it, a different colour -- coupled with a mouse-over stating that the original questioner found this the most helpful response) would be an idea? It might also make sense to sort by votes by default, but if that has been rejected in the past (as several comments to the question suggest), then this might be a suitable compromise. – TripeHound Sep 29 '15 at 10:45
  • The problem with this is that the correct answer is sometimes not the top-voted answer. This seems to be especially true in very basic questions, where many of the voters are likely beginners/students. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Sep 30 '15 at 0:14
  • @BoltClock: "this should be the accepted answer" (i.e., the best-suited to the question as stated) doesn't mean that people do not understand what "accepted answer" mean (i.e., the answer chosen by OP). I've seen (and did it myself) people ask OP to change the accepted answer and many oblige. OP knows the true intent of the question and OP has more skin in the game then the passer-by voters. It is much easier to recognize a good solution then to create one. If OP no longer active on SO then the accepted answer may lose its privileged position after a while. – jfs Sep 30 '15 at 3:45


You are writing out of premise that a higher upvoted answer is a genuine ideal source of knowledge, covering all the possible cases and outcomes.

In reality it is not.

There are many answers allowed, and on the purpose. For me, it even takes several questions to browse, before I can find a satisfying answer, scrolling each through answers regardless of score. It's a part of my job, and I don't complain. I think you are overly nursing users. One who's looking for the good solution, will check several answers anyway. One who seeks only quick and dirty answer, will be satisfied with accepted answer all right.

Speaking of UX, there is already a question, covering UX issue with old answers at whole. Why not to calm down and wait until our administration will come up with a brilliant solution they surely decided to implement, based on such a representative poll?

  • 17
    It's quite sad that expecting users to read more than one answer seems to be considered by some to require too much effort. – Bruno Sep 28 '15 at 13:31
  • 7
    @Bruno you mean, as a dev, it's my responsibility to test multiple things, adapt code from the internet to my use case? DUDE, THAT'S HARD! Just gimme something copy/pastable into any IDE, any language, any project, to make my thing work – Patrice Sep 28 '15 at 13:35
  • 3
    @Patrice I wouldn't go that far, otherwise you could even be expected to try to understand what you're doing. We don't want to go down that road. – Bruno Sep 28 '15 at 13:40
  • 4
    @AmitJoki sorry if it wasn't clear. I was being sarcastic, HIGHLY sarcastic. This is totally expected of a dev, and you DEFINITELY should do exactly what you say :) – Patrice Sep 28 '15 at 13:40
  • 1
    @Patrice this is the third time I ain't getting a pun/sarcasm, annoying! :D Anyway such sarcasm, much wow! – Amit Joki Sep 28 '15 at 13:45
  • 7
    This answer is somewhat tone-deaf to UX. Look at it from a slightly different perspective. Accepted answers are often outdated compared to other answers 13% of the time (see my graphs where the solution gets accepted). From a UX perspective, why would you present outdated information first to the user? – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 13:48
  • 4
    @y3sh Firstly, what's outdated and what isn't is often for the reader to decide (I know it can seem surprising to some devs, but not everyone can use the latest versions and framework of the month all the time, that's just a fact). A more recent answer certainly doesn't imply a correct or better one (no hard stats obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised if 13% or more of newer answers were actually not providing any improvement over existing answers, to compare it to your 13%). Reading an answer (or other document) with its timestamp is an essential skill (... cont'd ...) – Bruno Sep 28 '15 at 14:19
  • 1
    ... if this is about both upvotes and more recent answers, then the vote numbers clearly stand out in terms of UX. You'll often see immediately if there is a second answer with a larger number of upvotes straight away. It's can also generally be useful to read the two potentially conflicting answers to find out which one applies to the case you're looking for. There's no real way around that. – Bruno Sep 28 '15 at 14:21
  • Fascinating discussion. I think SO's ripe for another user study to examine the anecdotal thoughts of @Bruno as well as the common sense of this answer. Yes, this perspective might be true for a million users, but what if it's untrue for the other millions? SO is a Q&A leader, which is why it's improtant to ask these questions here. – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 14:52
  • I didn't read this answer, I had to scroll a lot! – Arghya C Sep 28 '15 at 20:16
  • I've had users cry that their question is not a duplicate of another question because the selected answer wasn't applicable to their problem, but other answers were. It's happened so often, that I had to edit the selected answer to reflect this (was a "Can I do X?" question and the selected answer was "You can do Y" with no mention that X is impossible). – cimmanon Sep 28 '15 at 21:18
  • @cimmanon To be fair, duplicate questions are for questions, if another non-equivalent question can have the same answer, that's useful, but that certainly doesn't necessarily mean the questions are duplicates. – Bruno Sep 29 '15 at 11:45
  • @Bruno That's just it, the question's are duplicates and one of the answers does express that X is impossible. I actually had one user claim that I "wasted their time" by linking to this question when the selected answer doesn't apply to them . – cimmanon Sep 29 '15 at 11:57

You're bringing up a subject that, as of late, has been near and dear to my heart. I've been tasked with looking at this exact problem and trying to figure out what, if anything, can be done to fix it without breaking the way we do things.

Stack Overflow is different from other sites because we allow the user who asked the question (the OP) to accept the answer that worked for them, even if that answer happens to be bad practice or even wrong.

The way I see it, there are two different types of accepted answers that fall into your "underdog" group:

  • Obsolete, out of date, wrong accepted answers - let's call these "controversial answers"
  • Good accepted answers where there is another higher scored answers - we'll call these "other answers"

Of these two groups which one do we or should we be targeting? Do we target both or just one?

Other Answers

I think the largest group of your "underdog category" is going to be the "Other Answers". These are answers that are scored higher than the accepted answer, but there are several things that also need to be considered when discussing them:

  • Is the accepted answer wrong or contain bad information?
  • Does the accepted answer not actually answer the question?
  • Does this "other answer" provide a better solution than the accepted one?
  • Is score enough to decide we need to move the answers?

Besides the examples in your question, this category includes interesting answers like this which is great accepted solution that directly answers the question. The question also has another answer that has a higher score, but you have to read a entire book to extract a solution. Why does this really long answer need to be moved above a short specific solution? A lot of similar answers fall into the "underdog" category and potentially would be impacted by any changes to sorting put into place.

It boils down to what signal should be used to "swap" the "other answers"?

Controversial Answers

The second category of answers is the "controversial answer". I believe this is the where the biggest concern is. These are accepted answers which could be negatively scored, contain out of date/obsolete information, contain bad advice, yet the OP accepted it because it was the solution that worked for them. At one point, these might have been good (or even great) answers that received upvotes but now they only receive downvotes.

By default, the accepted answer (unless it's self-accepted) appears at the top, so these yucky answers show up even if we don’t want them to be seen first.

One solution would be to:

enter image description here

But then we are losing content, which might still be useful to people running older systems, so that's bad.

These are also not necessarily the easiest to find. They potentially could be identified by looking at Total Votes vs Current Score. If the Score is significantly less than the Total Number of Votes, then it's possible these might be "controversial". But once we find them, then what?

Now What?

enter image description here

I'd suggest reading Shogs gallbladder answer, while the stats are from 2013, the numbers and percentages are roughly about the same today. To get some current stats, I quickly threw together a SEDE query.

| # Ques w/ Accepted Answer & Another Answer                       | 2,593,911 |
| # Ques w/ Accepted Answer Score < Another Answer                 | 419,853   |
| # Ques w/ Neg Accepted Answer < Another Answer                   | 7,908     |
| # Ques w/ Neg Accepted Answer < Another Positive Scored Answer   | 5,180     |

There are a lot of questions that have an accepted answer that scores less than another answer, but the number impacted drops considerably when you start digging into the data based on score.

We are back to the question what is the problem we are trying to solve? Are we looking for a broader impact for any question that has an answer that is scored higher than the accepted one?

This is a good discussion to have, but as you can see it tends to lead to more questions. All I can say right now, is we're looking at it. I've got a few ideas to possibly solve it, and we're planning on discussing it in the next 6-8 somethings.

  • Great writeup and thanks for the SEDE query for visibility! "This is a good discussion to have but as you can see it tends to lead to more questions." -- exactly. This is why my goal isn't to prompt change, but better understand the questions that need to be asked and research them. – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 21:32
  • You really think this is a problem? Well if you want to address it the solution is remarkably simple. Include a sort option for answers called "hot" that uses the reddit algorithm. I suggest you look at the MSE post by Jeff Atwood meta.stackexchange.com/q/11602/178816 for more information on the algorithm. – Travis J Sep 28 '15 at 22:48
  • @TravisJ Yes, we do think there is a problem but it's difficult to identify exact how big of a problem it is. Adding another sort option which removes the accepted answer isn't something we are thinking about at this time. Having the accepted answer at the top is part of what makes SO unique from other sites. – Taryn Sep 29 '15 at 3:05
  • You forgot the third category: A better answer posted a significant time after the question was asked, where the OP realized that the new answer was better than any previous answer and changed their "accepted" answer. It's newer and has fewer upvotes, but it's still the best answer. We'll call these "Unicorn Answers". – JDB Sep 29 '15 at 11:28
  • 1
    "Obsolete, out of date, wrong accepted answers" I really can't see how you put out of date and wrong answers in the same bag. Something that's wrong is just wrong, so ideally it should never be upvoted or accepted (of course that can still happen). What's obsolete really is a matter for the readers to decide what applies to them. Many of us have to deal with some legacy systems one way or another ("legacy" could mean 6 months old, btw). – Bruno Sep 29 '15 at 11:40
  • Given that members other than the OP can edit questions and edit answers, would it be valid to let other members vote to change the accepted solution? – y3sh Sep 29 '15 at 14:59
  • 1
    @y3sh No, that goes against the SE model. The accepted answer is the answer that helped the user who asked the question. The community can vote on what they feel is the better answer. – Taryn Sep 29 '15 at 15:00
  • 2
    I see the conflict highlighted here. By placing an answer above others and putting a big green check mark on it, we communicate that it is the best answer. In reality, it is the answer that most helped the OP at the time. Or more frequently, it is the answer that once long long ago helped an OP who has since lost interest. – y3sh Sep 29 '15 at 17:15
  • I think you missed the point. The communication is not that it is the best answer ever possible for that situation, only that it is the answer which solved the OP's problem at the time. 86% of the time it is also the highest voted answer according to your statistics. – Travis J Sep 29 '15 at 18:18
  • I have also seen some cases where the original question has a constraint and the accepted answer take that into account, but then there is a highly upvoted answer that do not take the constraint into account. But most users did not care about the constraint and thus upvoted an answer that does not strictly answer what the OP needed. I don't know how common that is though. – Zitrax Feb 2 '16 at 10:37

A proposed solution:

  1. Sort answers by default in score order with the highest score at the top.
  2. No longer pin the accepted answer to the top of the list.
  3. Give accepted answers an implicit bonus. This could take two forms, either a fixed 10 point bonus, or count each vote as double. (This implicit bonus only affects sorting order, not the score shown.)


  • Accepted answers are still given preferential treatment. After all, the OP decided that the accepted answer solved their problem.
  • Allows the community to affect the sorting order of the answers on a question to reflect the fact that the answer most useful to the community-at-large may not be the accepted answer.
  • Encourages careful, well thought out answers. Often the accepted answer is the most quickly written and, while correct, it doesn't do much to explain why the solution is correct, and how to avoid the problem in the future. Giving ability for answers to float to the top, even if they aren't accepted fixes this problem.


  • Sorting logic would require modification. Accepted answers are already treated differently, but this would change the specifics.
  • The two options suggested may give too much/little preference to accepted answers.
  • Using the doubling option suggested may make the accepted answer fall too quickly to the bottom, and give the impression that it's worse than it is. Alternatively, it could cause answers to stay at the top longer than the community determines useful.
  • Perhaps the accepted answer could get the number of votes of the second-place answer plus one upon being marked as accepted, but follows normal voting behavior after that. This would allow the OP to select which answer is shown at the top, but allows underdogs to eventually take their place at the top. – raumkrieger Sep 28 '15 at 12:56
  • 4
    "or count each vote as double". no. – Félix Gagnon-Grenier Sep 28 '15 at 13:12
  • 1
    I like this proposal (except that I agree with Félix Gagnon-Grenier regarding the doubling option). Giving the acceptance mark a limited effect in the sorting order rather than no effect at all would help avoid possible perverse results when low-rep users ask questions. – Louis Sep 28 '15 at 13:15
  • 1
    @raumkrieger - I like that solution, but it would require the answer to have additional metadata attached. As in some kind of virtual vote score that only applies to accepted answers. Also I don't think that it solves the fast answer + accept issue, since a 1 vote threshold is easy enough to overcome on a popular question. – theB Sep 28 '15 at 13:23
  • @FélixGagnon-Grenier - I suggested the doubling to be somewhat in line with the populist badge's requirements, but I agree that it could give an accepted answer too much weight. – theB Sep 28 '15 at 13:27
  • The problem with the value of a tick is that it is unquantifiable. The difference between votes and ticks is like the difference between a string and a number; how can you possibly put a value on it? Simple answer, you don't; it's a simple visual flag that lets the reader know that this is the one that the OP selected for their own reason. Maybe the tick should be less obtrusive? – Paul Sep 28 '15 at 13:30
  • 1
    @Paul: I disagree that it's unquantifiable. At present, it's quantified in rep as 1.5 times as much as an upvote. So make it count as 1.5 upvotes. This avoids all ties and gives a significant but not overwhelming boost to accepted answers. – Nathan Tuggy Sep 28 '15 at 14:51
  • @NathanTuggy: But that value is undermined by the fact that some answers are of poorer quality than those that deserve the tick (hence this post). And besides, that's just reputation. There's only one correct answer for an OP, whereas there can be many up-votes for an answer (and not necessarily the right one!). As I see it, the value of a correct answer is as flexible as currency. – Paul Sep 28 '15 at 14:57
  • 1
    @Paul: Some answers that get upvotes are also of poorer quality than others that do, so I don't think that makes that much of a difference. – Nathan Tuggy Sep 28 '15 at 15:00
  • @NathanTuggy: It's the economic flow of SO! ;o) – Paul Sep 28 '15 at 15:05
  • I don't care if the questioner found it the best answer. I'm more interested in what i find the best answer, and given that the site can't provide that, then second best option is to show me what the majority of people thought was the best answer. It's (slightly) annoying that sorting by votes leaves the selected answer at the top regardless of votes, and making sorting by votes the default wouldn't fix that. – user146043 Sep 29 '15 at 9:44
  • @Alex - That's the point of this suggestion, that the accepted answer is no longer pinned to the top. It gets a bonus for sorting purposes, so that it is given slightly more weight on account of being accepted, but other answers can shift the answer from the first position. – theB Sep 29 '15 at 10:54
  • @theB Sure, I upvoted it. Although it's asking for suggestions and i'm giving a solution! To be clear, no weighting for the accepted solution please; we can already see clearly what the questioner thinks is the best answer should we want to; now we need a way of ignoring it entirely in the face of all the other voters. – user146043 Sep 29 '15 at 10:59
  • "ascending score order" is that really what you mean? Least score first, top score at the bottom? – Bruno Sep 29 '15 at 11:33
  • @Bruno - Good catch. Surprised that it took so long for anyone to notice. (Myself included) – theB Sep 29 '15 at 12:47

I think your data is missing the fact that many users don't need to scroll down and many will find that the accepted answer solves their problem ,the same as the op, and not need to scroll down to the next.

I would argue that these users are going to be more likely to be the ones that don't have a stackoverflow account or are aware of how this site works and are going to be less likely to vote anyway. Those that do scroll down and find an "underdog" are going to be more familiar with the ways of SO and recognise that there may be other better answers that address a subtlety from the OP'S original question.

Consider, my "underdog" answer, this wouldn't solve the OP's original question since they were using a different framework version to the one that my answer addresses and rightfully doesn't deserve to be the accepted answer. My answer has slowly been growing a steady vote count due to the fact that the op's question title comes up quite a lot in google search results and people find it through that.

I guess my point is that I do not think there is a problem in terms of the Q&A format, the op asked a question and got a right answer, other people later had the same question and found that my answer solved their needs better. This is the whole point of providing multiple answers and not just settling on one.

In my example, those that had the same set up as the op would still need Daniel Roseman's answer and wouldn't benefit from mine too much. So by showing my answer first to these users would therefore deter them equally as much.

  • 2
    Yes, especially in low traffic tags that intersect with high volume tags (javascript, jquery, etc.) An answer, that does not work at all in the full context of the question, will get massive upvotes from people who clearly didn't understand the question and ignore key modifying tags ([userscripts], etc.). I won't link the examples to avoid the meta effect, but many "underdogs" are caused by voters who didn't test the answer, nor understand the question. They merely keyed off of select words in the title and 1 or 2 of the several tags. – Brock Adams Sep 28 '15 at 19:26

I suppose it is down to the OP to select which answer suits them, irrespective of whether the said answer is full of inaccuracies or not, reasons as posted in all of the previous answers/comments. However, other readers should surely be encouraged to read further (let's face it, how many times have you read only the marked answer for a quick fix?).

Yeah, yeah - I know all those dedicated SOers are going to say I always read all of the answers. I'm sure I don't always have the time, probably much to my detriment, so I read the first two or three... And, in a lot of cases I daresay, it will be the same for the casual observer popping in from a search engine, especially those with little experience or just starting out on their own journey.

One possible solution to this would be to alter the ordering of the answers, or allow the reader to alter the ordering themselves, promoting different aspects of answers, such as up and down votes (let's face it, knowing what not to do is just as important), time posted etc.


The checkmark indicates the solution that the OP used to solve their problem. There is a tremendous amount of signal there, and it is very useful to see at least to the person who raised the situation what a solution was. Also, as @Hans points out, this signal is accurate 86% of the time.

As to most problems, there can be multiple solutions. While time passes from when the original post was created, more content is posted in various places of the posts. This information over time can provide a more in depth solution to a situation and that is when other posts tend to outshine accepted answers.

Part of the "underdog" behavior shown is simply copying. Literally copy paste in many situations including one of the three highlighted here. If you look in the revisions here: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/869486/revisions , and you look at the accepted answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/196687/1026459 you will notice that someone came along and copied the accepted answer into this post. That paired with extra information gave it enough traction to outpace the accepted answer. Luckily this does not happen very often, as it is only a small percent of an already small population.

There is no solution here, because there is no problem shown. Moreover, there was no support shown for your premise that showing accepted answers first "alters user experience and culture over time" which I strongly disagree with.

  • By definition, UI decisions alter user experience. I'll cite other answers here, particularly bluefeet's, that this issue has affected SO culture. Aside, your answer could be improved by supporting your strong disagreement. – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 21:44
  • @y3sh - As the affirmative position here, it is your burden to provide evidence of your stances. I may disagree and point to status quo being that the culture is not altered. If you believe it is altered, provide evidence of it. That is your burden. – Travis J Sep 28 '15 at 22:51
  • Could you point me to the status quo? I don't think the null hypothesis here is as concrete as it may seem. – y3sh Sep 29 '15 at 14:29
  • @y3sh - If you cannot identify the status quo I am afraid that we cannot have a positive conversation about this topic. How can you pose an argument or make a stance if you cannot even identify what the current situation is? – Travis J Sep 29 '15 at 18:16

I think the real question is: do we need a solution for the "underdog" problem?


Inevitably, User accepted answers and higher voted answers are not identical all the time. According to your statistics, the difference is 14% of the time, they are different. Is this a statistically significant indicator that they are much different in terms of votes? I don't think so. If two answers are off by one or two votes, is one of them really an "underdog"?

Is this different an indicator that the accepted answers are less worthy? This is a much deeper question for which the statistical support here is kind of shaky.

The mathematics aside. I think there are other factors to consider. Among many other things, one factor is to consider is originality. If you are publishing research articles, I think it's customary to cite the original paper that addressed a problem first and then the ones that improved or even corrected the original ones.

I think the same goes here. Often times, the higher-vote questions are posted much later. Many of those are based on the original answers including the accepted one, and some are polished/updated version of the original answer. Although SO is not a publishing business, and giving credits to earlier answers is not required or even encouraged, IMO, having accepted answers on top is a good way of giving credit to the original authors.

Arguably, there are other flaws in the question. The term "underdog" for higher voted is problematic. They don't feel like beaten answers.

Also, the main problem seems to be that people need to scroll down to the higher voted answers. If the accepted answers are less than a page, this is not necessarily an issue, because the higher voted answer would still be immediately visible. How often people have to scroll down requires more thorough statistics.

From a practical point of view, as other answers suggested, if you are really looking for a working answer, would you mind to scroll down to the second answer?


"underdog" is misleading here. If the answer is the most popular i.e., it won the popular vote; it shouldn't be called an underdog. The badge Populist better reflects the situation.

If the answer is accepted; it does not mean that it is the correct answer.
If the answer has the most votes; it does not mean that it is the correct answer.

If the answer is accepted then it might imply that it has helped at least one person (the OP).
If the answer is the most popular then it may mean that it says simple agreeable things (on the surface) and/or posted by a more popular/with higher rep author.

Unless you've reviewed a significant number of posts where the accepted answer is not the most popular and you have at least some data that suggests that the more popular answers (on average) are also more useful (compared to the accepted answers) then there is no problem to solve and no solution is necessary.


Notify the Question asker that this "event" or situation has occurred.

Questions are asked out of necessity and mostly forgotten once the necessity has passed.

That collective knowledge however lives on helping others. Thanks to subsequent (and sometimes much netter) answers coming along the value of the question actual grows as more answers are added not diminishes.

If each question holder was notified, upon some metric based trigger to prevent "chatter", and if that notification were clearly worded to indicate the desired outcomes I'm sure most question answerers would in fact review the answers and make a choice.

I think making a choice should also be indicated. Yep answer 2 is more popular than answer 1 but I'm sticking with answer one. Indicate that the choice has been made so anyone looking for an answer can also clearly see that as well.

Abandoned questions (abandoning question holders) can be put up for adoption (although there might already be a means for this to occur with communities leaders) but yes the weeds need to be managed as well.

  • 3
    It looks like the Metacogs around here like to downvote without giving you any rationale. Just "yeah, no, piss off". – Warren P Sep 29 '15 at 14:33
  • Yeah - I kinda got that :) – Techmag Sep 29 '15 at 18:04

What if StackOverflow prompted users who have accepted an answer, only once every 12 months, and only where an answer was accepted more than 12 months ago, when evidence exists that an Underdog answer is the real answer today, even though the answer the OP accepted 12 months ago was correct at one time, it is no longer correct.

Perhaps evidence could be collected by allowing users to flag an accepted answer as "no longer up to date, dangerous, or outdated".

When the user accepts the new answer, re-award the Accept answer points, in such a case.

  • I suggested this once, it went badly. – Travis J Sep 28 '15 at 18:10
  • 1
    I'd like to know WHY this is a bad idea, downvoters. Comment and enlighten me? kthxbye – Warren P Sep 29 '15 at 14:34
  • @Travis where is the suggestion that went badly? Im also trying to spot the the wrong in the idea. – matt wilkie Nov 11 '15 at 17:43
  • @mattwilkie - It ended up at like -37, I would prefer to leave it be. – Travis J Nov 11 '15 at 18:05

The official stance on accepting answers seems to be that the OP should choose the one that was most helpful to him. That always seemed like a bad policy to me because we don't care that much about the OP. We care much more about the dozens to hundreds of later visitors coming to the page to find an answer.

Answerers strive to create lasting value and not just help one person. Why should the behavior of the OP be exempt from that goal? (It should not.)

The stats show that only about 14% of the time the underdog effect takes. I think the number is much higher for frequently visited answers. You should run the stats for answers with at least 1000 views. I think this problem has greater impact than this statistic suggest.

We should no longer encourage to OP to pick an answer from him point of view. We should encourage him to pick the answer that is most likely to help future visitors. We should tell them that at the point they make the decision.

All of Stack Overflow is about creating lasting value for many. Not sure why we make an exception for the accept mark. Since there seems to be disagreement with this answer I would like to see some counter-arguments expressed in the comments so that we can have a discussion.

  • 1
    Hmm, interesting. – Lightness Races in Orbit Sep 27 '15 at 22:45
  • 13
    I disagree, this is the way the OP indicates what solution worked for him. The most voted answer isn't always the correct one. To me, the tick has a fair weight attached to it. Because it solved someones problem !!! – Rohit Gupta Sep 27 '15 at 23:27
  • 2
    That query is simple to run, so why not. Number of questions with accepted answers viewed more than 1000 times: 1,253,593. Number of underdogs in those questions: 219,766. Overall percentage of underdogs is 17.5% for SO posts with >= 1000 views. So not much higher. – y3sh Sep 28 '15 at 1:55
  • 3
    Upvotes and acceptance marks measure different things. I don't see a problem with it. YMMV. – Todd A. Jacobs Sep 28 '15 at 5:05
  • 3
    Logically, this answer should be marked accepted. – Nathan Tuggy Sep 28 '15 at 5:39
  • @NathanTuggy that is actually right! :) – boot4life Sep 28 '15 at 10:28
  • @RohitGupta so you don't care about the dozens of other people who also want their problem solved? Optimize for them. – boot4life Sep 28 '15 at 10:28
  • 1
    It is an excellent point. There are already notes to OP's to assure their question is also useful to others. And as a recent meta post notes, it is frowned upon if someone asks for private help through SO (and so would be able to withheld a solution). Last but not least: if an OP deletes their own question, even that decision can be rolled back if it was deemed useful for the general audience. – usr2564301 Sep 28 '15 at 11:59
  • 1
    @RohitGupta, it may very well be the case that answers posted after OP accepted an answer also would have solved OPs problem. In fact, after the question has vanished from the first page, most of the votes will be from googlers that are experiencing the same problem, and if a non-accepted answer has more votes, chances are that that answer solves the original problem in a better way. – aioobe Sep 28 '15 at 13:33
  • 1
    How can the OP for any question presume to know what the "best answer" is going to be for future visitors? I think that implies a degree of prescience not even the smartest, most knowledgeable folks here can claim :) Put a different way, someone asks a question, someone provides a solution, but the OP says, "I can't accept that, because someone might provide a better answer next week...?" In that vein, perfectly valid answers may go a long, long time unaccepted... – David W Sep 28 '15 at 13:40
  • 4
    So "we" don't care about the OP. So why should the OP bother asking questions here? – itsbruce Sep 28 '15 at 14:21
  • 1
    @itsbruce because he gets answers for his problem. I don't know what point you are trying to make. – boot4life Sep 28 '15 at 18:32
  • @DavidW that's usually obvious. The OP asks "how do I add 1 and 2?". Someone answers "You add two numbers by writing a + b". That's clearly a good and general answer that also applies to "3 + 4" for example. – boot4life Sep 28 '15 at 18:34
  • All the counter arguments expressed here so far are making contrived assumptions or are painting the worst possible case or are (intentionally?) overlooking obvious remedies. I challenge you to come up with a coherent argument that a reasonable person would agree with. – boot4life Sep 28 '15 at 18:35
  • 1
    @boot4life - Easy - a solution to a problem in Java 7 was correct and best at the time it was offered; Java 8 provides a completely different solution to the same problem due to a language enhancement or new native capability. On the day it was answered, it was the best answer. A year later, it wasn't. Impossible for OP to predict that, and I would respectfully suggest that's neither "contrived" nor "worst possible case." – David W Sep 28 '15 at 18:38

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .