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The responses from this question:

What has happened to the sorting of answers on Stack Overflow?

Seem to indicate disagreement with this change. Please return the sorting system to the way it was before based on time instead of randomly sorting answers with the same number of votes.

Edit:

In my typical meta fashion I have applied a ridiculous bounty to this question.


Response to Podcast #66:

Codexon's blog post

Mentioning codexon's blog post about how to game reputation by posting a scaffold answer ("peanut butter and jelly" was the example) and then copying a correct one to fill the spot so that your answer appears on top is a great reason to revert to the old method. Now, you don't even have to post first to game this way. Since the sorting will be random now, just find a decent answer with 0 votes and copy/paste it as your own, and now you can appear on top as if you were copied. With the time sorting method, copying another answer would push the duplicate to the bottom.

Every answer should be judged on its own merits

This was never an issue, answers have always been judged by their merits. A great example is my own answer to a very simple question, which was basically just a collection of other answers with a benchmark added. It came in over an hour after the accepted answer, but it has been voted up higher. It wasn't magically "unread" because it started off lower in the answer order.

Also, some questions just don't deserve an answer with your definition of quality. A lot of jQuery questions, for example, are basically "which selector should I use". How much quality could you possibly want for questions like that, copying the jQuery documentation? If someone is actually willing to make a summary of the docs, they will get upvoted anyway.

I want people to read all the answers

Huh? How does this change by sorting them randomly? If a user would stop reading beyond the first post, what is going to make them start now? Again, this new sorting system only makes it worse! If they just vote for the first post they see (which may or may not be a duplicate), there is now incentive to leave copied answers (instead of delete them and upvote the first one) because your answer might get lucky enough to be on top.

Of course you could edit your post and make it better, but again, it would be upvoted similarly using the old sort order. Again, it also may not be worth a tremendous effort depending on how simple the question is.

There is an incredible amount of angst and hand-wringing about this new sort order

This is blatantly incorrect. Nowhere in this thread is anyone truly upset about the change, we are merely expressing disagreement with it. We're trying to help benefit the site and the community, not scream and whine about the change. Personally, I couldn't care less which sort order you ultimately use, I'm just explaining which way I think is better.

Random is better ... in surveys

StackOverflow is not a survey site, it is a question/answer site.

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12 Answers 12

up vote 18 down vote accepted
+350

This should be a comment to Jeff's response but it doesn't fit in the comment space so I had to make it an answer:

I find the resistance to the new votes sort ordering from a vocal minority very perplexing.

You made an implicit assumption that this is the "minority" and the other way (apparently how reddit guys think) is the "majority." There's no way to prove whether it's true or not in general but as Rich B pointed out in a comment to this question, it doesn't really matter. Everyone is free to express his or her opinion on Meta SO and apparently, the "majority" of the "vocal minority," who represent people that care about SO are against this change. Next, you targeted an implicit ad-hominem attack on people expressing their opinions here. Apparently, you are accusing them of "whining" because "they are at a disadvantage." Most of these guys are high profile users on SO (cletus, Rich B, tvanfosson, TheTXI, ...) who have contributed heavily to the sites. This proves they really care about your Website. I'm sure this whining is purely a result of they caring. I find this implicit accusation on the borderline of being insulting to the high profile users of your site. It's like saying "Shut up or you're one of "them"."

Note that it's not resistance. We didn't boycott StackOverflow. We just expressed our opinions.

To clarify, due to daily reputation cap, it doesn't make any real difference (rep-wise) for most of the users who've "whined." They'll achieve their cap easily regardless of the system in place because they provide plenty of good answers.

First, to clarify: this has nothing to do with tactical downvoting. It is not meant to address that issue at all. Tactical downvoting is the same as it ever was.

I'm not saying there hasn't been any kind of tactical downvoting before. What I'm saying is that it increases the benefit of tactical downvoting. In this system, if someone with a later answer downvotes you, he has much more chance to get upvoted.

Beside that, it now makes downvoting duplicates an ethical and good practice. I, for one, think you should downvote duplicate answers that come later (on all posts, not only your posts.) This is not inherently a bad thing. However, it encourages "revenge votes." You downvote a duplicate answer and he'll get angry and will downvote you.

It's purely a fix for the votes sort order. The answers are sorted by votes. But what sort order do you use when every question has the same score? We had to pick something, so we picked LastActivityDate. I was never happy with this choice (it wasn't even really a conscious choice, honestly), since it had a side effect -- we were implicitly rewarding behavior other than composing answers worthy of upvotes!

It was the natural choice. It was so natural you made that decision unconsciously. You were quite happy with it. Listen to your podcasts. Actually, I think (I'm not sure, though) the new decision is highly influenced by that reddit thread. It was the right thing to encourage quick answers and this was considered "by-design" in SO. If anything, between two identical answers, the older one should be rewarded the most.

Now answers with the same vote score are in random order. Which means answers can correctly be judged based on their merit as answers, not by who happens to end up first in the accidental secondary sort order we didn't even intend to be relevant in the first place.

First, it's not accidental. It's an indirect results of many parameters like when you've seen the question and how much you know about the topic. Obviously, Jon Skeet doesn't need to search about a question about say, a switch statement but some other guy might just Google stuff and copy paste there. Second, the OP wants a quick answer as fast as possible. There is a distinction between a "half-complete" answer and a "wrong" one. I believe posting a "half-complete" answer as soon as possible directly helped achieving one of the hallmarks of StackOverflow, which is "getting answer immediately." Third, this is really the behavior we've had before. If the answers were virtually identical, the fastest one would get upvotes and if the answers were not identical, the better one would eventually float to top.

To the extent that people have "optimized" strategies around that behavior, it's completely a side-effect. A distraction.

Another thing mentioned in the other thread is that people are used to the old behavior. They think the answer floating on top is the first one and upvote accordingly. Even if this decision was a good one, it's significant enough that it should have been mentioned explicitly.

Bottom line: if you want to get upvotes, WRITE A GREAT ANSWER.

This has been happening ALL THE TIME. SO is full of great answers at the top of questions. And by the way, if you really believe in this decision, you should really consider stop docking the accepted answer to the question. If the best answer, quality-wise, is supposed to be on top, let it be the most upvoted. (This is just a side note. It's not a part of my argument.)

(comment) "There is no drawback to posting late?" Not so. The earlier you post, the more opportunity for people to VOTE for your answer. If you wait, you're losing potential votes. – Jeff Atwood♦

Exactly, there's more opportunity to VOTE for your answer. Vote is not equal to "upvote." Let's not forget this vote can be both "upvote" and "downvote." Let's not forget that in the "fastest gun" version, if you posted a crap sooner than anyone, you would have been voted down to the oblivion. It's not always been a good thing.

Bottom line: You've not addressed the SCITE problem; the fundamental problem with this issue. So far, your answer was effectively like saying "Hey, I can do it so I did it." IMO, This is a valid response but if you want to use it, you should be open about it. It's not possible to say "StackOverflow is run by You" and this statement at the same time. Definitely, we don't want to deal with "propaganda" on StackOverflow. You can choose to come back to the spirit of StackOverflow (either by providing a good solution for SCITE or reverting to the old system) or jump the shark and be more like "hyphen." It's all up to you. :)

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I agree. If we don't revert, you could track Jon Skeet's recent activity and immediately clone his responses (change variable names, at most) and submit :)

As a result, IMO, not only downvoting strategically is ethical now, it's even encouraged to fight gaming the system with the Slowest cheater in the east (SCITE) problem. You should downvote any duplicate you see in the new system.

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I agree. I don't see any reason why we ever departed with encouraging the FGITW issue, but the solution is far worse than the cure.

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Completely agree that the old method needs to return. The potential for abuse on both ends is higher now. People will start downvoting much more to move people down the list who tie with them, and you are also giving equal footing to people who post duplicate answers. As long as the vote totals remain the same, any normal user would be unable to determine who actually posted first. Therefore the first answer they see (even if it was the duplicate) has a higher probability of getting the upvote.

Stop punishing those of us who contribute quality answers quickly. As I have said numerous times, bad answers go to the bottom regardless of when they are posted and good answers should bubble to the top regardless of when they are posted.

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I knew that Jon Skeet should never have posted his random shuffle code.

The new algorithm introduces a gaming tactic of downvoting an earlier answer that was upvoted. Previously, this would have done no good since it would still appear higher in the default sort order. Now there is some gain to downvoting this answer (as long as it is only one greater than yours) since you can increase your visibility on the question. As long as the OP can select the best answer and accept it I think we ought to be using the old system. Good, early answers will continue to get votes over later answers, but the best answer will rise to the top due to the ability to accept an answer.

Personally, I don't think that I am often the first answerer -- unless I'm the only one. My tactic is to try and write complete answers with references and examples. More often than not the inclusion of references and examples trumps quickness.

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I rarely look at meta and I am perplexed by the few people who are constantly obsessed with strategic downvoting. For what it is worth, I have posted several answers late on various threads and they got upvoted pretty fast.

If I post my answer and then see that an equivalent answer was posted while composing my answer, I just delete mine.

I get hit by the occasional drive-by (or revenge) downvoter. Usually, I post a comment asking why my answer was downvoted and that elicits a couple of upvotes. All in all, things balance out.

If someone is fast enough to copy & paste my answer in a few seconds, get a few upvotes and cost me a few potential upvotes, so be it.

I like my points, I like my perl badge, but, at the end of the day, I answer questions because that motivates me to learn new things, read docs I have neglected for a while.

Thank you Jeff. Starting meta was a great idea so these kinds of discussions do not end up dominating SO.

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I find the resistance to the new votes sort ordering from a vocal minority very perplexing.

First, to clarify: this has nothing to do with tactical downvoting. It is not meant to address that issue at all. Tactical downvoting is the same as it ever was.

(edit: this other change is meant to address the tactical downvoting.)

It's purely a fix for the votes sort order. The answers are sorted by votes. But what sort order do you use when every question has the same score? We had to pick something, so we picked LastActivityDate. I was never happy with this choice (it wasn't even really a conscious choice, honestly), since it had a side effect -- we were implicitly rewarding behavior other than composing answers worthy of upvotes!

Now answers with the same vote score are in random order. Which means answers can correctly be judged based on their merit as answers, not by who happens to end up first in the accidental secondary sort order we didn't even intend to be relevant in the first place.

To the extent that people have "optimized" strategies around that behavior, it's completely a side-effect. A distraction.

Bottom line: if you want to get upvotes, WRITE A GREAT ANSWER.

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I believe that this new change is just fine.

For people who want the answers sorted by time, they can simply change their sort to 'oldest'. For those who want to sort by votes, they will receive a list that is (as they requested) sorted by votes.

In general, being the first to post is still advantageous, it means you have more time to gain upvotes while there are no other responses. However, once the other responses appear, why does it matter which is first, the upvotes should be based on whose response is better.

A side effect of the previous system was that if there were many posts with the same number of votes, and mine was the earliest, I was unlikely to edit it for fear that I would lose my top spot. Usually it was grammatical mistakes (I'm aghast I made them in the first place) but occasionally they were links or other such helpful tid-bits. Sometimes I edited and got upvotes, other times I edited and found that the other answers (with less information) got upvoted soon after. In making my response better, I lost reputation.

This new system is meant to combat that.

I don't know if it will work. But I'm willing to try it, rather than explode with indignation after only 8 hours of it.

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If you write great answers, what do you have to lose by this change? Doesn't random imply that if you have the same number of votes, you are just as likely to be on the top as on the bottom with those who have the same vote/score?

I tend to think that this will help people who answer 2nd or 3rd with a more complete answer compared to number one who people give votes to for being first. Being first doesn't make you the most correct. It is the content.

Since content drives this site, I ask, what are all of you so concerned about? You have high rep due to content, not the fastest gun in the west, right?

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When did this happen? I've always used "Oldest" sort rather than "votes". Maybe that's a better solution: registered users see it sorted that way instead, or some variation thereof.

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There can only be one answer.

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At the risk of being flamed some more, I am offering my opinions on this matter, and a possible solution. Scroll down if you just want to see the solution.

  1. I have noticed that users with a large amount of reputation, including some of the people in this very thread, have a vested interest in the old style. A random sampling of answers for these high rep users show that they are often the first to answer, usually within 1-5 minutes from when the original question was asked.

    The "they would have reached the 200 rep cap anyway" argument is wrong because its all about how fast you can get 200 rep, and then how much extra time you have to get accepted answers afterwards.

  2. SCITE: From what I've seen recently, this hasn't been a problem. Voters who really care about who answered first will be refreshing often, and will know who answered first. Voters who don't care will equally distribute the points to whatever answer is on top. But in case this becomes a bigger problem in a future, see my suggestion below.

    The timestamp is also accurate unlike the old FGITW system where people can steal answers in the first 5 minutes.

Solution

Remove the 5 minute free edit time.

You can then reinstate the last activity ordering which will still encourage fast but good answers.

How will this solve the problems?

  1. FGITW: If someone posts a fast but bad answer, they will get ignored or downvoted. If they try to copy someone's answer, they will get bumped down.

  2. SCITE: If someone posts a slow and copied answer, the sort by last activity ordering will relegate them to a lower position.

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