Upvoting questions

Question

For some time I was off the site and the first thing I noticed when I came back was pathetic number of votes on questions. Most of recent questions have 0 or 1 upvotes which means they usually have more answers than upvotes.

The thing I don't really get: if I find a question worth enough to spend a few minutes to write an answer isn't is good enough to get my upvote as well? I mean, typing all those words takes way more time than a single click which is needed to vote on a question.

Personally I try to vote on questions which are on-topic, phrased well and trying to solve a specific problem (like it is stated in faq). I do it even when I don't answer them for whatever reason (they already have good answer or I don't have one to share).

Now, the thing which bothers me is why it is so? Is there anything more we can do to encourage people to make use of their voting privileges? I'd love to see many Nice Question badges as there are some good, specific, topical questions on PMSE recently.

Answer 1

Well, this has been covered for a while :)

Some light reading that might be of interest, and documents a few changes we made to address and incentivize question upvoting:

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/05/vote-for-this-question-or-the-kitten-gets-it/

• http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/asking-better-questions/

Obviously, vote early and often, but also don't hesitate to edit questions to punch them up and make them more interesting and vote-worthy along the way, too!

Answer 2

I have also noticed an extreme detriment on the number of upvotes across the board. I have been off for quite some time and have not access PMSE in a while and have also noticed that lots of questions have 0 or 1 upvotes (max 2).

My first thought was that, as it has happened to myself, users that put a lot of effort in compiling information to respond a good question and the users that also spend some time refining the topic to post a good question were all on holiday or back from holiday and catching up at work with limited time to spend on the site.

However, since we are already in October, I have started to think that users might be holding their upvotes on those with higher levels of reputation.

I have been thinking about how to encourage new users to ask and improve their questions. New users struggle to get more than 1 or 2 upvotes for either questions and answers given and they might find the site being led by users with higher reputation. If we could support these users (I'd include myself), that might be also new to PM, to streamline their questions and upvote their corrections so they don't feel that this is a competition among experienced PMs maybe we could get a positive reaction on other votes cast.

What do you think?