Questions with more answers than votes

Question

The question How do you develop the ability to express yourself via your instrument (e.g. guitar for my case), as I write, has 0 votes (not just 0 score, but 0 votes) and 9 answers.

That prompted me to wonder how often we have a 0-score question with an above-average number of answers.

The average number of answers per question is 2. So a quick query for 0-score questions with 3 or more answers yielded 503. That's 2.4% of our total questions, which seems like a lot.

Nevertheless, the discrepancy between question value and answer enthusiasm doesn't raise my eyebrows until a 0-score question gets 5 or more answers. That's happened 67 times, which I suppose isn't terrible. Weird, but not terrible.

Nevertheless, does it seem odd to anyone else that we, as a community, have so much to say about questions with, evidently, zero value?

Answer 1

I totally agree that it is kinda weird. I try to vote on any post (both questions and answers) that I read, especially the ones that I answer. Or if I see a question that I haven't voted on and it has generated quite a few interesting answers, I will vote then. Because we have had some quite "uninteresting" questions that went on to produce many answers that proved that the question itself was more interesting and needed to be thought about, more that we initially thought.

Generally, you can see this phenomenon quite often across the various SE sites,i.e. users are more likely to answer a question and/or vote on the answers, rather than vote on the question itself.

There is quite a long discussion on meta.SE:

• Why aren't people voting for questions?

There are 56 answers to the post, so there are many valid points being made, but here is one that stood out for me:

As I see it, the 'workflow' of reading a question/answer goes like this:

1. User opens page

2. User reads question

• Unless the question is abnormally good or bad, or otherwise provocative, this isn't likely to elicit any emotional response. It's just a question, carry on.

3. User scrolls down and begins reading answers

• As there are many answers, and good answers are rewarded by being 'accepted' and also with increased reputation, this puts the user in the mindset of 'make the answers better'

• The emotional response behind having your answer accepted or upvoted is "I know stuff, I'm smart, I feel good." Likewise, conferring that reward on someone else is quite a powerful thing too. This provides a very strong motivation to rank and provide answers.

4. Because of this motivation, people will put a lot of effort into writing answers (like me with this diatribe) and ranking them.

This works very well for providing and filtering good answers, but there's no such motivation behind voting for questions. For most questions, the strongest response they are likely to elicit is "I have that problem too", which while it's strong, is only going to apply to a small portion of the viewers/answerers.

_anon

Answer 2

My personal experience is that I came here after getting sick of [another site which has voting], and one trend I noticed on [other site] was that I frequently saw highly voted posts or comments that "sounded smart" but were completely wrong or nonsensical. As a result, I made a habit of not voting on subjects I'm not already quite familiar with, so that I would not inadvertently contribute to this misinformation campaign. I never really put much thought into voting since joining here, so maybe this post will achieve something just by reminding people to vote.

Although, I will say that I do sometimes write answers which are not really worth my time to write. I bet a large portion of my posts on [other site] fall into this category. So perhaps a few of the questions with answers but no votes are a result of this kind of thinking.

Answer 3

To me it's much less intuitive what is a good question, in comparison to what is a good answer.

SE guideline is to upvote a question that

shows research effort; it is useful and clear

1. Questions often demonstrate misconceptions or lack of knowledge. It's not unexpected, as we ask questions when we don't understand something. However it might be difficult to distinguish lack of knowledge from lack of research effort.

2. Usefulness is difficult to judge. Questions about topics that are simple for me are typically not useful for me. So maybe a better guideline is "is the question written in the way that someone with a similar issue would easily find it when searching the internet or SE"? But it's often still difficult to judge.

3. Questions are very frequently unclear. Many questions miss essential details or context (see e.g. Could SE ask for more details on the scores in questions). Some others are unnecessarily wordy and make it difficult to understand what is the particular question being asked.

In particular the question How do you develop the ability to express yourself via your instrument (e.g. guitar for my case) is rather wordy, takes very long time to get to the point, mentions multiple different issues and to me it seems unfocused and open ended. For the very same reasons it may attract multiple answers.

I like the following list of suggestions for writing a good question https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/337465/629012 . I wonder if there is something SE could do to help users (in particular new ones) to write better questions?

To summarize:

• I believe many questions on Music SE are not so great, though I'm not sure whom to blame
• It's more difficult to rate questions than answers