A new way of getting good answers on top

[klutt]

I was planing to post this in a thread about obsoletes, but I think this is a bit wider than just that.

At SE, the sorting is simply in order of the score, with the exception of accepted answers being on top.

I propose that it can get weighted in different ways. Ideas:

• Newer votes counts higher than old votes

• Votes from users with higher rep counts higher

I realize there are problems with this method, and the exact weights needs to be discussed. But I think something like this might help getting better answers on top for old questions.

I also got a spontaneous idea that I definitely have not thought through, but I thought it could be worth discussing. It’s a new way of voting. How about being able to vote on an answer in relation to another answer? I practice, such a vote should mean “I think this answer is better than this”. Just a spontaneous that might be crap. Give your opinions.

[Corsaka]

Proposal: votes, scores, and answer order

We’ve had a lot of discussions around voting, scoring algorithms, reactions, expert responses, answer sorting, and new answers to old questions getting neglected. From all that input I make the following concrete proposal (MVP unless noted otherwise): For each answer we display raw upvotes and downvotes. This makes controversy visible easily. For each answer we compute a score thus: (upvotes + 1) / (upvotes + downvotes + 2). Scores are not directly displayed. (The constants here are co…

We’ve already had this discussion, and we also don’t have reputation.

Your first point is dealt with by the obsolete content threads (of which there are two, for some reason?).

[luap42]

There is already the decision to give new answers some prominence in the functional specification, but it is not for MVP:

Not MVP: For questions older than (default) 6 months, new answers are labeled “new” and given a bonus in the scoring formula for the first (default) 7 days. This allows new answers to have more visibility when there are high-scoring answers present already. The amount of the bonus is TBD. All values are configurable per-site, including turning this feature off.