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Have you ever given an answer that it is and can be proven as correct but has never been accepted or upvoted? It is so frustrating!

I am not a child and I am not whimpering, I know the rules, most of them, around here: no one is obligated to answer, to accept an answer, to upvote or even to ask a question, we do what we do voluntarily, but still, zero votes is frustrating. How can we fix that?

I thought that a mechanism able to predict the questioner's (OP) intention (approx) to accept or to upvote an answer based on its past activities would be useful, rather complex but useful (making an evaluation of the user's profile manually is time consuming). Bounties are close to that but not so efficient, are more for special occasions.

On the other hand, educated users in DA terms could be an other and maybe the most appropriate solution.

Perhaps I am not aware of many things, moreover I am not such an experienced user, but I wanted to stress this issue and share my thoughts.

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    Unfortunately, this can happen when answering Q's from newbies. They need at least 15 rep points (I think) to vote. Also, they don't know about the ✓. Furthermore, they are probably oblivious about the rep system and don't know that doing either of those things will give you rep.
    – No Sssweat
    Commented Mar 4, 2016 at 2:10

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SE used to have such a mechanism. It was simply showing the user's acceptances as a percentage of the number of questions that user had asked with upvoted answers. In my own case, if the person asking the question had an acceptance score of 10 % or lower, it was just like that person had earned the "help vampire" gold badge - and I moved on.

At one point, this metric stopped being displayed in the user profile. I don't think it was ever given an official explanation, but it is not unlikely that this metric being displayed discoraged answers to people with a low score. Answers is what keep SE rolling, so SE decided that this feature was not aligned with the business goals of the site.

If this was the motivation behind it's removal, it unlikely that any mechanism or feature assisting us in identifying people who habitually don't accept good answers will be introduced again.

So much about the owner's non-response to your good answer. However, if nobody else upvotes it, maybe it wasn't such a great answer? My own experience here is that really good answers that are not accepted are "rewarded" with more upvotes than answers that are accepted. Since acceptance equals 1.5 upvotes, 2 extra upvotes make the you come out ahead.

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  • I wasn't aware that such a mechanism existed once. Your argument about the business goals, does make sense, even if its removal benefits the "help vampires". Given that you have answered my question proves that my effort wasn't in vain. I don't think I said too much, it was a plain question, in case you meant that by "so much". Eventually, seems that the most appropriate solution is to educate the system's users'. Thank you for telling me about your experience which is more valuable than 100 up-votes.
    – mchar
    Commented Feb 29, 2016 at 20:28
  • The "so much" part was a direct response to your "never been accepted or upvoted" (my emphasis). Newbies and help vampires don't accept. However, everybody with a rep. greater than 15 can upvote and my experience is that good answers get upvoted if they're not accepted.
    – Free Radical
    Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 5:44
  • History: Let's stop displaying a user's accept rate; this answer in particular makes an argument for removing it, though the rest of the answers are worth reading (including answers arguing to keep it).
    – Jeffrey Bosboom
    Commented Mar 11, 2016 at 4:08

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