The synergy between voting and acceptance of answers on StackOverflow - Or the lack thereof

Abstract

Stack Overflow's primary goal is to serve as a platform for users to solicit answers regarding programming questions, though its archives are often used by other users who face similar issues and thus it serves a secondary purpose of documenting common problems. The two driving mechanisms for filtering out low quality posts and highlighting the best answers are community votes and the mark of acceptance by the original question asker. But does the asker's choice always match the popular vote? If so, is the asker's choice influenced by the community vote or is the community vote biased towards the accepted answer? And if the asker and community disagree, then can we determine any particular characteristics of posts that influence the choice of the asker and community differently, such as its size, readability, presence of code snippets and external links as well as similarity to the original question? In this paper, we explore the answers to these questions by studying a data-set of all posts on Stack Overflow from its launch in September 2008 to September 2014.