I think that if we have an answer score, one user should contribute at most ±1 to that score. And if we have an “answer karma” (official presentation of the sum of votes on a user’s answers), it should just be the sum of the scores. But the default sort order should not be based purely on post score.
Stack Exchange already does this in a very limited way by allowing the asker to pull the answer of their choice to the top (accepted answer). This mechanism has unsurprisingly not aged well, since the accepted answer cannot be changed if the asker isn’t around.
The sort order should take three things into account:
- The answer score.
- The age of the answer, and perhaps of the votes. If a new answer gets 5 upvotes on its first day, it’s surely more useful than an answer that’s stayed at 5 upvotes for three years.
- “Reactions” which are special upvote-like markers left by users.
On GitHub, reactions are a small set (currently 8) of “votes” that users can leave on a post. Facebook recently introduced a similar mechanism. Both show reactions as emoticons and show who left each reaction; I don’t necessarily propose to copy this behavior.
The basics of reactions in my mind:
- Reactions do not affect score or karma/rep/EXP.
- At least some reactions affect the default sort order.
- The set of possible reactions is fixed on a given site.
- Different reactions may have different prerequisites, for example ”non-scoring upvote“ would be available to anyone, “confirmed answer” would only be available to the asker, “an expert vouches for this” would require a certain score in one of the question’s tags.
(edit: This is a variation on @ user1306322’s earlier proposal which had escaped my conscious mind when I wrote this answer. Sorry user1306322.)
Some aspects may be customized per site:
- Which reactions are enabled.
- The impact of each reaction.
- The prerequisites of each reaction.
- The guidelines for giving each reaction.
- The visual aspect of each reaction.
Some open questions:
- Are reactions anonymous?
- Are there negative reactions as well as positive?
- Can reactions have influence beyond the sorting order and beyond appearing in the margin of a post, such as pushing a post into a queue? (I guess that’s implementable through a feed mechanism anyway.)
“An expert vouches for this” would be sort of like giving a bounty for an existing answer on SE, except that it works the other way round: influencing the sorting instead of giving more points.