I really just do not get this new thing about allowing only the asker to vote on a question.?

      I don't particularly mind that voting is gone. And, since I'm at level 7, points from a BA don't mean anything to me, although, BA's do. I agree with you that askers should be seriously encouraged to pick a BA. But, even at that, what good is it to get picked BA if you can't easily tell how well you are doing? BA is like a trophy. But, what good is a trophy if it's buried in a pile of stuff and out of sight?

      I mostly answer math questions. And, I do tend to look for questions from askers who are more likely than not to pick a best answer. But, lately I've been just answering questions without doing that as much and my percentage has been dropping. My experience is that many askers do not take the time to pick a best answer. But, even if they do, it's now too difficult to determine how well my answers are being received. On the old green format, I could look at a page of 20 of my answers and see at a glance how many askers had picked best answer and how many of those were mine. That's impossible to do now.

      We don't get paid to answer questions here. The only satisfaction to working up an answer is to see if it can be made good enough to elicit a best answer pick by the asker. At least with questions labeled as open, in voting, and reference, it was possible to keep track of how well received my answers were. But, with the labels gone we are expected to take the time to work up a good answer and then throw it out into the void and forget about it.

      This new purple format is just as good as the old green one from an askers' perspective. But, it offers very little if any incentive to the contributors to keep pumping out answers ... especially the top contributors.

      From a contributors' perspective, this used to be a very good site ... That's no longer the case.

There's nothing to get really. Askers don't vote... they choose. And it's definitely not just very few. A lot of askers do choose best answers. I actually have a feeling more are choosing than did before because of this change. But who cares. Do we really have to worry if we'll have less best answers? Is it that important. This isn't a game or competition and there's nothing we can do with the points. What should matter is YOU know you gave a well thought out, helpful answer. Even if the asker doesn't choose, it doesn't mean your answer wasn't appreciated. I also think that this new rule of questions not going to voting, eliminates people voting for their own answer who vote for their answer without even considering the other answers.

It has always been my pet peeve that so many askers fail to choose a Best Answer.

(And I don't care if it's my answer! Just PICK one!)

I was never a fan of the voting system, either ... there were too many ways to manipulate it and abuse it. I won't miss it.

Yes I DO think askers should be required to choose a Best Answer ... or at least, strongly encouraged to do so! This could be done by not allowing a user to ask more questions until he/she chooses Best Answer for previous questions, or by 'charging' a LOT more points to ask, then returning all but 2 of those points for choosing Best Answer (for example, 25 points to ask a question, 23 points returned for choosing Best Answer).

I don't think I'll lose my TC anytime soon, and I'm not sure what will happen with users' Best Answer percentages. Seems to me that unless askers are strongly motivated to resolve their questions, many questions will just remain 'out there' and that most everyone's BA% will go down as a result.

first of all, the asker does not go back to vote for the BA, they pick it because all voting has been eliminated

before, if the asker left it too long to pick a BA, the asker could vote for an answer along with everyone else

Yahoo has given no proper explanation for this drastic change but the popular opinion is that they did this to stop people from getting overblown BA percentages, points, etc. due to asking others to vote for them or voting for themselves with extra accounts

on the right side of your activity page (Answers Home), there is Featured Content which has links to blogs staff post about the new format

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since voting never had anything to do with the asker picking BA and the asker can still pick BA, why do you think less askers will pick BAs?

it's not like people will say, Oh, well, no more voting so I won't pick a BA - they will still do that as often or as little as they always did

what will change is that overall, we will ALL get less BAs because the ones we would have gotten from a community vote have gone byebye

but keep in mind that we are ALL in the same boat - if my BA % goes down, so does everybody's

I think it is amusing that you can no longer vote and it is going to upset a number of those who have multiple accounts and vote for themselves multiple times. One user that I know of surprisingly gets three votes for each and every question he answers and has a best answer average of 75%. Only issue I can see is if people don't bother with the best answer choosing then the site could get clogged up.

For years, people have complained the voting was not fair with people voting for their own answer or using multiple accounts. So Yahoo has basically said, you don't like it, we will just take it away. They gave us what the compaliners asked to get.