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The site has recognition for good answers based on upvotes. People decide to view the question based on the question's relevance to them, and then vote based largely on how useful they find the answer. So an answer needs to be reasonably good to get an upvote but the potential upvotes is governed mainly by the popularity of the question.

I have come across a few exceptional answers to questions that were good questions but did not have wide appeal. The answers were not just well written and well organized, they were exemplary in authoritativeness, clarity and breadth of the answer, and showed a significant investment of time to polish the answer.

Unfortunately, they were answers to questions that few people were interested in, so there was little opportunity for recognition through upvotes. It would be nice to have some provision for recognizing answers that are exceptional in quality independent of the question they are attached to.

Edit: As one possible type of mechanism, I could envision something like any user (or user above some rep), being able to nominate an answer. Maybe monthly have some form of community "vote"/poll ("vote" for any/all of those answers you think are exceptional). By votes, I don't mean upvotes, although people could decide to upvote an answer after seeing it. I'm referring to poll votes. All answers getting more than X "votes" gets a quality badge.

Edit: I've been educated. I had missed the feature of using bounties to reward good answers. That's a good solution for people with lots of rep who can afford to do this. For everyone else, maybe the solution is a "charitable foundation", where others can point out worthy answers and hit up the high-rep members for bounty handouts. :-)

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    I've bountied a few of those in the past, though with a reputation a shade of 60k, I can afford to throw a little rep around. As with anything outside the vote system, who decides what's such a question? Its a nice notion, but the details are kind of important.
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 5:15
  • A bounty promotes a good question but you don't know at that point what the answers will be. I'll add an implementation idea to the question.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 5:50
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    @fixer1234 - You can start and award bounties at any time, including if the question is already answered, marked as accepted etc
    – Robotnik
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 6:30
  • "The answers were not just well written and well organized" then they are not exceptional answers at that point. I take a LOT of effort to write even the most basic answer. When somebody takes no effort to write a grammatically correct, detailed, documented, sourced answer I feel like I have wasted my time doing so. "t would be nice to have some provision for recognizing answers that are exceptional in quality independent of the question they are attached to." there is place a bounty on the question this will lead to an answer worthy of reputation.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 15, 2014 at 0:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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There already exists a bounty reason for rewarding existing answer

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I don't see any reason to make it more complicated

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  • You can even leave it 'featured' for the full week, possibly garnering more upvotes for the question/answer in the process
    – Robotnik
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 6:30
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    I missed that nugget. Too bad only people with lots of rep can afford to do this.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Oct 13, 2014 at 6:38
  • @fixer1234 - Post high quality answers and question and in a very short amount of time you will have thousands of reputation points.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Oct 15, 2014 at 10:56

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