It would be ideal if we could have posts set for two distinct behaviors:
stay pinned unless a user chooses to unpin
automatically unpin after viewing
The setting available now treats all pins the same globally based on the user setting. But there are some cases where we’d rather a post stay pinned for multiple viewings (reliably at the top), still okay for users to unpin if they opt-out of the pinning on that specific post. And there are other cases we just want something prominent for users to see once and don’t want it to stay pinned.
The problem with too-many pinned posts is a valid concern. But being forced to make unpinning behavior global per-user encourages setting the stay-pinned option, thus exacerbating the too-many-pinned problem in order to have even one or two posts that really should stay pinned.
We’d like to have just a handful of posts on the whole site that stay pinned and lots more that automatically unpin. This behavior should be a per-post setting. Having that would be super useful.
For example, we have a post about positive communication patterns (beyond the Guidelines). We’d like to encourage people to revisit it and to know reliably where to find it. There’s something cognitively nice about core things having a place to always see them. So, cases like those can be timeless and worth revisiting.
Another example could be a guide to a working process that should be refreshed in people’s minds often when posting in a category.
Another less permanent example could be a post about a milestone or particular current status of something which could be updated or removed when that is over. Within a category, having that prominent at the top (unless users individually opt out of it) would be appropriate.
Whereas there’s tons of long lists of things where people just need to get the note once and never need to see it again.
The primary distinction between these cases is per-post rather than per-user.
As is, if we want just a single stay-pinned post somewhere (without it being a banner), we have to use the opt-out setting for stay-pinned system wide. Then, we may not even post the majority of should-be-pinned posts because of not wanting them to stay pinned.