Update: A version of this was posted in mother meta exchange in case you want to cast your agreement/disagreement there. Ironically, it being at +3/-3 here is so positively surprising to me that I went ahead and did it.
I know many flavours of this have been asked time and time again, but it seems the last time this was brought up was 6 years ago. Also, I don’t have access to site analytics so I am only going to talk about how things feel as a user (apologies!).
There is a lot of talk on question moderation (righty so) and question downvoting but there is less talk about answer moderation and upvoting.
As a (basically) new user to the site, it is frustrating when I answer a question or see an answer to a question that gets basically no community feedback. I am taking about $0$ votes answers that users put genuine effort and thought into. Very often OP (or anyone) won’t even put a comment/vote in let alone mark it as accepted. I still like to answer despite this risk because I like physics and I know it might help googlers in the future, and maybe it helps the new user who originally asked it.
The community, i.e literally anyone with 15/125 rep, who is in charge of upvoting good answers and downvoting bad ones is thus responsible for moderating answer content. This doesn’t feel like it works because I see good and bad answers sitting at $-2<x<2$ votes long after the question was asked, and of course, no acceptance either. This is not only my answers as I described above but many users’. There seems to be very little participation in the community when it comes to moderating answers, which is crazy given almost anyone can vote. This unmoderated answers are thus of unknown quality to whomever unearths the question years later. Not very useful...
So, I propose, for both user retention purposes and answer moderation purposes, a x > (some rep) user endorses this answer badge, like Piazza has for instructor and TA. This could have a queue like the first question queue. High rep users on some tag (excluding rep on accumulated solely on Homework tag) could browse questions that (since they passed Question moderation) are useful, and have been answered, but with an unmoderated answer.
I know that they can already do that with their 40 votes per day and a little comment saying “this makes sense to me” but this endorsement, next to where the accepted answer checkmark is, would make people perhaps feel more secure the answer is correct (which ironically the check mark does and it shouldn’t). It also could come with some associated rep which maybe would entice people to answer questions more and just use the site more in general. Also this might help with the common side problem of users answering in the comments, making their answer unjudgable by the community via votes.
This endorsement badge would maybe counter the frustration that comes with answering (to be) abandoned questions that have been deemed worthy by the community, and would also make the a site more useful resource.
Just an idea for a new feature, let me know your thoughts.
Also, I’d love to know if site analytics disagree with me.
Also, to give this (pre-edit quote) visibility:
..it is frustrating that I come here to answer questions and sometimes I end up wondering if anyone read the answer... this line sounds to me like it is a "you" problem more so than a "site" problem 🤷🏻 - Kyle Kanos
This is a very fair take on my post. Maybe other people feel the same way I do though. Let me know what you think of the feature idea. Ultimately, this is about a potential improvement to the site.
