Why can't you award medals to everybody that responds, instead of picking only 1 person to give a "best answer" to? Considering it usually takes more than 1 to answer a question, shouldn't everybody get a medal if they all contribute?

Question

farmdawgnation · Answer

Under the current definition of what a medal means, that's not how it is intended to be used. Do keep in mind that the way that medals work changed significantly with SmartScore. They have a lot more weight from the asker than from other users, and medals from users with a high score mean more than medals from others in the general population.

Because of this, and for a handful of other reasons, we introduced Best Answer to provide some scarcity to medals. Our working hypothesis is that this will prevent abuse (i.e. medal parties, question sniping) thereby giving the score more credibility, it will encourage people to provide more detailed solutions in hope of getting the Best Answer medal, and ultimately promote better interactions between askers and answerers as a whole.

Just like any other feature, we're constantly listening to feedback from the community and monitoring our internal metrics to see what is actually happening in the wild. It is, as you might say, under constant review. :)

hero · Answer

I don't know....it seems to me like everytime I give feedback in the form of a suggestion to improve an existing idea. It gets auto-axed.

hero · Answer

And that discourages me from making suggestions.

anonymous · Answer

Hey @MSMR - as @farmdawgnation mentioned, the rewards system is definitely something we constantly review and reassess. @apoorvk had some excellent suggestions regarding this in another post also. 

So, in closing, we're definitely looking at it, and keep coming up with ideas/feedback like this - it *really* helps. Cheers!