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Comment by phonebanshee | Hacker News Reader

Marked as answered is a fundamentally horrible idea and that feature should be removed. The problem is that the person asking the question isn't capable of determining a correct answer. Far, far to often they pick something that appears to solve their problem but actually is a terrible idea.

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Well, the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the asker, then there are the votes and comments to evaluate whether or not this is a good answer.

> the accepted answer means that the solution proposed worked for the asker

That's a fundamental tension in the purpose of the site. If the particular problem of the asker is the end goal, then duplicates would not be closed. All other site criteria institute a strong demand for general interest of questions.

Part of its success may be deftly balancing those two conflicting interests. On one hand is the role of helping people, and the other hand is a non-repeating and immediately useful knowledge base. Both of these demands bring human attention, and satisfying either requires real work by a human. The challenge is to keep the relevant human around just long enough to do enough work so that you have plausibly usable content.

Accepted answers are a site design tailored for one use, but it is fantasy to pretend that it harmoniously exists along side the other use. They are not separated. Design elements oriented toward one way of use degrades the other use.

That's a pretty good point.

That's the theory, but it's amazing how often I click on a search result leading to SO and find an accepted answer that's either wrong or doesn't even answer the question.

A lot of the times, "right" and "wrong" depends on context. An answer that works for me may be the wrong answer for you. But the "accepted answer" mechanic is useful as a way for the asker to communicate to the site as a whole that the question is no longer in pending status, and that others who are browsing around to see what needs to be answered can move on to other questions.

> question is no longer in pending status

But practically forcing users to select an answer as "good" should probably not be the only way to do this.

And right below it is the answer that goes on far too long. So long that it requires headings, an introduction, an abstract, a recommendation, caveats for the recommendation, a discussion of alternatives, some performance comparisons, critiques of a few other answers (including the accepted one), a conclusion, and a table of references.

I know because I write those kinds of answers.

I wish they would unpin those answers from the top - leave the green checkmark, just let me sort by whatever has the most votes recently - say in the past year. Then we'd get more up-to-date answers more attention, and more readers would find them.

Even worse is when the accepted solution is either deprecated or no longer works in future versions of the language/framework used. This is where Stack Overflow's "archival" nature seems to stop working, and where answers based on upvotes would work better.

I think they should support both the "accepted" and "best" answer use cases. Have separate indicators in the UI for them.

In the common case, the accepted and best answers will probably be the same, so keep the classic green checkmark there.

When the accepted and best answers don't match, have two checkmarks (or whatever) - one that explicitly says "user XXX accepted this answer" and the other that says "this is the best answer".

They have this in the form of upvotes. If the community disagrees with the selected answer, they can use upvotes and downvotes to reflect their opinion. Then, a user who is reading the question can sort answers by vote count.

Marked-as-answered shows their original vision of the site (with a homogeneous work queue), and that they didn't want "What are the best ways to organize state in your app?" But I think the lack of sites providing for more open-ended questions means people wanted Stack Overflow to do both.

Fully agree. There are lots of instances where highest voted answer aren't the best answer or even wrong. Usually I look for the comments to a given answer to assess the quality of answer.

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