Initial remarks:

What I write has been proposed before (e.g., in comments or answers) but I would like to open a specific feature request here.


When sorting answers, I currently have three choices: "active", "oldest", and "votes". I'm usually not interested in the first two, so I chose "votes".

However, it is clear that this is not the best solution (as explained here). Example: A five-year old answer, which was good five years ago, has accumulated a lot of up-votes. A new, up-to-date and better answer may rise eventually to the top. But I think this takes too long and should happen faster.

Specific proposal / feature request:

I would like to propose to add an additional sorting option for answers. The sort score would include information on when a vote was cast. Old votes will have less weight.

A good, "natural" choice for a function that defines the weight of votes based on their ages seems to be a logarithmically decaying function, as proposed by Servy in his answer here.


  • To avoid a common misunderstanding: This proposal does not want to weight recent answers stronger (than old ones) but it wants to weight recent votes stronger (than old ones).

  • As pointed out by Servy in the comments, StackExchange already tracks the time every single vote was cast on every single post. Therefore, the proposed solution should be feasible.

  • The proposed solution will still give old good answers an advantage over new answers because they will initially be above new answers without (many) votes. If old answers continue to get up-votes, they stay at the top.

  • The proposal will not just put new answers at the top (as has been suggested). I do not think that new answers are always better. But it will allow good new answers (those that receive many up-votes) to rise faster to the top than they do currently.

  • This is not a duplicate of Is the latest answer the most correct answer? since this is a specific feature request.

  • Some people may not be motivated to spend a lot of time on writing a late answer knowing that it will take very long for it to rise to the top. Giving good new answers a little bias (not compared to good old ones but compared to bad old ones) makes it more attractive to write good new answers. This may improve the current situation a little bit, where most late answers are worse (as indicated by Hans Passant in the comments). This is a possible additional benefit of the proposal. :-)

  • Biasing new votes would also encourage updating old answers since recent good votes will improve their position in the list. (If this question was an answer, it would profit from the proposal: The text of the original proposal was not perfect and was therefore misunderstood by some people, leading to many down-votes. After updating it several times, the ratio up/down votes is now better. A function that biases recent votes would lead to an overall score that would better reflect the current state of this question. However, it depends on the time scale.)

  • This approach would allow to address the fact that the content of StackExchange pages does not change as quickly as news sites: StackExchange could just choose a slower decaying function than news sites.

Add-ons and alternative approaches

  • This proposal is similar to the very good "vote velocity" proposal made by "ptutt" here. Martijn Pieters suggested to open a new feature request. However, this has, unfortunately, and as to my knowlege, not been done, yet.

  • What I write here was also proposed by "Servy" here, but not as a feature request but as an answer to another question.

  • One could even allow each user to set the parameters of the logarithmically decaying function so that sorting of answers can easily be even more individualized.

  • An alternative to this approach would be to allow sorting answers based on only recent votes (e.g., last week, last month, or last year). However, I find this approach too digital and therefore prefer the proposed solution with the continuously decaying logarithmic function.

Final remarks:

I do not think that we have to change the whole system completely. In general, StackOverflow works pretty well. And I do not claim to provide a perfect solution. Every solution has its drawbacks. However, I believe that sorting the answers is very important for StackExchange sites and the current sorting algorithm could be improved by this proposal.

  • a) how do you deal with EXISTING answers where the votes time are not compiled? b) I have a feeling like this may overload the servers because they will need to keep WAY too much info (btw, it IS a good idea, I'm just poking the obvious hole at it) – Patrice May 18 '15 at 21:01
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    possible duplicate of Is the latest answer the most correct answer? – Joe W May 18 '15 at 21:03
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    Or just sort by oldest, scroll to the bottom – LittleBobbyTables - Au Revoir May 18 '15 at 21:03
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    @Patrice SE does actually track the time every single vote was cast on every single post currently. (Just look at the schema of the tables in data.SE, even though up/down votes are anonymized, the dates are recorded.) You also know that they track it because votes can only be reversed for X minutes, meaning they need to track when votes were cast. – Servy May 18 '15 at 21:03
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    @Servy I never explored data with votes in mind, so I was not aware of these. In that case, forget my objections! Thanks for clarifying. Then YES we need something like that feature – Patrice May 18 '15 at 21:04
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    Well, there's also the timeline to show they need to store the times (though for this 1d granularity suffices). For this post: meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/294637/timeline – Deduplicator May 18 '15 at 21:32
  • @Deduplicator ok ok I got it :P I need to explore the system more before I say stuff ^^. Timeline is pretty nice though :P thanks for letting me know it exists, I WILL use it in the future :D – Patrice May 18 '15 at 21:34
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    The 95% case is that late answers are worse. Not just a little bit worse either. Biasing them makes very little sense. – Hans Passant May 18 '15 at 21:37
  • @HansPassant: Yes, this may indeed be the case. I don't know the statistics, so I can't comment on this. However, my proposal would not put new answers to the top per se. Only those that get up-votes have a chance to rise faster to the top. If the old answer is still better, it'll stay at the top. The sorting algorithm could also be fine-tuned by setting the function that weights the age of the vote cast. So, one could introduce a moderate change first without risking much. It's just a sort option that people may choose - or not. – vomako May 18 '15 at 21:41
  • This is essentially what the "hot" tabs to for the past week and month. – Travis J May 18 '15 at 22:03
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    Can you explain why the Active tab is unhelpful? – BSMP May 18 '15 at 22:08
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    @BSMP. Hello. It may actually be helpful if one is interested in the latest activity. However, most of the time, I do not want to see the most recent contribution at the top but the one that has the highest likelihood of solving my problem. As HansPassant wrote, most late answers are worse. Therefore, sorting with the "active" option is usually not helpful for me. :-) – vomako May 18 '15 at 22:12
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    @HansPassant: This proposal does not bias late answers but recent votes. This may even improve the situation that you described: Some people may not be motivated to spend a lot of time on writing a late answer knowing that it will take very long for it to rise to the top. Giving good new answers a little bias makes it more attractive to write good new answers. This may improve the current situation a little bit, where most late answers are worse. I've updated the discussion section accordingly and hope that I could address your concerns. :-) – vomako May 19 '15 at 7:00
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    @Pekka: I don't think that showing the most recent answers first is a good solution, as suggested in the entry you link to. I propose to bias new votes over old votes, not new answers over old answers. However, thank you for the link. I think the answers are interesting. :-) – – vomako May 19 '15 at 9:38
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    something happening with this? – ItamarG3 Jun 28 '17 at 8:41

Novel approach to scaling votes by percent of views voting for an answer.

Answers are sorted by up-votes, which are not actually the whole story. When a viewer chooses to vote an answer up or down, it serves only to affirm or change the point in time ranking slightly. If a viewer doesn't record a vote most likely he agrees with the current rankings or even does not support any of the answers.

Consider a question with 1000 viewers. If 200 of them choose not to vote, they agree with the ranking at that time. But, if later on, there are only 10 viewers in a month, but they all agree that the new answer is best and they vote it up, there should be increased weight to those votes, both because everyone who is currently voting picks the answer, but also because the late viewers were looking for THAT answer and all the rest of the answers were not as good.

The vast majority of votes are cast in the first (just picking a number) 15 days, and that goes with the high number of views. I grant that new answers may not be great, but if there's a "groundswell" of support amongst late viewers, that should have an effect on ranking that does not exist currently, and in fact, as viewership of a question sags, even slightly late answers might get more accurately placed if the "abstain" voters or lack of other votes are taken into account.

In the beginning there are lots of viewers and lots of votes, but as a question ages, there will be fewer viewers, but if more of a percentage votes for a new answer than all the old answers, it should count for something...

The late votes are only representative if the people who voted for other options earlier come back to look at the new answer. If everybody coming back to read the new answer down votes it, then it should just cease to exist, if they up vote it should do much better than just attracting a portion of the votes of the viewership. Now, protection against gaming the system, that's in the details not included here.

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