Please upvote the questions you answer

Question

This is something that I'm very guilty of but I'm trying to improve. Somebody asks a question and I answer it to the best of my ability but I don't upvote the question.

If it's worthy of my time to answer it, then it's a good question, and I should be upvotng it, right?

EDIT: 55% of questions have fewer upvotes than highest voted answers. Source: https://stackapps.com/questions/8505/percentage-of-questions-upvoted-lower-than-the-highest-upvoted-answer/8506#8506

This has been discussed before: Vote early, vote often

I hereby resolve to go through my answers and upvote their questions.

After I made the resolution I tried to upvote all the questions I answered but was finally stopped by "Daily vote limit reached; vote again in 10 hours." I would like to suggest that for at least one day, we all spend our quota of votes upvoting questions.

Answer 1

After thinking about this for a bit, I decided to actually dig up data so we can be informed. There is already a SEDE query we can use to examine site data. The only thing this does not show is up vs down votes, but this gives the idea of what we are actually doing. The raw graph can be seen below at the time the post was written:

The actual number of votes is less, but we're also generating more answers than questions which is generally desired and wanted on SEs. Looking at the ratios between the votes and posts per question and answer get the following:

• Answer vote/post ratio: 4.39
• Question vote/post ratio: 6.156

Which seems ok. We do generate about 2 more votes (up or down) per question posted than answer posted. The bigger problem I'd say is we only generate 4 votes per answer and 6 votes per question and our question rate is pretty low only about 51 questions were asked last week.

To give an idea of other site's ratio, here's a sample of several other graduated SEs for comparison using the same query above:

1. WB SE:

   • Answer vote/post ratio: 7.25
   • Question vote/post ratio: 10.8

2. CR SE:

   • Answer vote/post ratio: 4.887
   • Question vote/post ratio: 5.069

3. RPG SE:

   • Answer vote/post ratio: 10.836
   • Question vote/post ratio: 12.190

4. The Workplace SE:

   • Answer vote/post ratio: 15.673
   • Question vote/post ratio: 22.6

The lowest rate of the sample SEs above is Code Review, but they have much more intense questions than most SEs. I may play around with the data more, but this alone gives us an idea what we need to do which is just in general vote more.

Answer 2

I do recommend us voting more as a community, however, up votes and down votes both should be used more. Because voting is tied to quality, we should use it but be aware of what it means for the site.

Up voting good well asked questions on the site will make them stick out and show off what useful questions we have have here. Down voting questions that are confusing, roundabout, or not useful helps us monitor, inform, and refine the question we have and display to the outside world. We can also always steer the OP into a better quality question by explaining our down votes.

Note if questions are not answerable, closing them makes more sense than down voting. We should still answer these questions, but showing quality helps us a lot. There will also always be questions in the middle. In a perfect world, every question would get a vote, but there is grey area. Also note that voting while important is still in the individual's hands and as such there's not a blanket statement we can give with voting on specific questions and answers. We can only really state guidelines.

While we're on it, off topic questions and answers are kind of outside the scope of voting and we should keep that in mind. We should deal with them though other means like closing, migration, or deletion. Down or up voting off topic content doesn't do much for us as a site.

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We're also fighting something else when it comes to voting which is the hot network question effect in which the whole network will see questions on the sidebar and come here and vote. When they do, typically they vote more on answers than the questions themselves and do not have the ability to down vote due to them needed 125 rep on the site. This leads to a lot of the lopsided voting on newly asked question that seem to get a ton of votes and views out of nowhere.

Answer 3

I don't know whether I'd agree that a question worth answering is always deserving of an upvote, but I've noticed the same thing you have about questions having lower scores than their answers.

Sometimes, I've noticed that there are questions that attract a bunch of downvotes but then get a good quality answer or two. Ultimately, upvoting is a personal decision, and I think every user on this site has their own unique criteria for what they'll vote on. For example, I vote up or down on nearly every post I come across, and some people only vote when something's really good or really bad.

A lot of our questions come from new users, too, and especially with questions that are really simple to answer, often the answers will be of much higher quality than the question itself.

And I know you have access to vote breakdown info on each post, but questions tend to attract downvotes more often than answers, since downvoting a question does not decrease one's own reputation. This could potentially be adding to the observed effect of questions having lower scores.

So I think at least some of that disparity in post scores is normal. But that certainly doesn't explain every scenario, and I'd be interested to hear the opinion of the mods on this one.

And yes, before you ask, I did upvote this meta question. :)

Answer 4

I think that's a very valuable consideration. I wouldn't say that it's always one-to-one. Sometimes a question may be unclear, and you answer on the off chance that it addresses what the OP was going for. But generally, I think you're right. Our questions often have much lower scores than their answers.

BTW, at 10k you will be able to get into the site tools through the review page.

Answer 5

There are times when I am annoyed enough at some question that a downvote+comment are insufficiently satisfying! So feel compelled to "answer".

Admittedly it has never happened for me on music.SE and rarely elsewhere. Here is a recent example.

That said I agree with this suggestion and try to make it habit to upvote the questions I answer.

Answer 6

What you're basically proposing is to have a system in place that automatically upvotes the questions you answer.

Since there's a limit on upvotes, you would then impose a limit on answers.

If you're comparing different SE sites, and wondering why there's a big difference, well, it's because they are different. We are the one manipulating those numbers, depending on what we prefer to discuss.

The data you're getting should be "weighted" further to accommodate the fact that some subjects are more quantifiable than others.