Review of questions votes system

Question

We have a question. Question can be either:

• good, when its clear, concise, meaningful (in other words: accepted).
• bad, when its duplicate, out of topic, unclear etc. (in other words: not-accepted).

So whats the purpose of voting up the question? For me it doesn't make any sense. Each question that passed a review is considered a good one, full stop. Users instead vote up for questions they like, or that they had experienced or that are interesting etc. Note that all this is NOT what [SO] says about voting up (vote for clear questions that show research effort etc.). So after time, some... strange questions get voted up many times; while the real value of these questions is actually low (i.e. questions are trivial).

IMHO, there is no point to vote up a question - review should be enough. Each person has its own value-scale, that depends on experience and knowledge, and rating a question by its votes is so... simple. Technically, if I see a nice question, with proper code and style and obvious research effort, i should vote it up, even if I don't have a clue what it is about?

Voting down questions also doesn't make any sense. There is already 'flag' feature (that works great!), so instead to vote down, just flag the question. It will be reviewed. What's the difference if some question has -4 or -5 votes? Is one better then the other? No. Both are bad.

Then we have answers. Answer can be:

• accepted by user who posted a question
• and/or accepted by community (i.e. has max votes)
• neither of above.

Here, the votes make more sense. Users vote answer that they think it is a correct one, or that helped them. There is a value in voting answers. But there is a problem in answers that are not getting attention or have been ignored by question poster - and usually these answers are on some particular topics that require more knowledge and efforts. I would like to see the system that enforces users to choose the answer, or at least to review/mark the answers (when they exist, of course). Anything is better then just having a non-accepted answer with 0 votes and no comments. Thats again has no value. Late answers sometimes can give a good value, but from my experience often are ignored.

To summarize above, I would like to see focus on establishing the real value of the questions - which is hard, i know - than just using trivial voting. And I am saying all this just because I like all this and just would like to see it better.

Ok, now you can downvote this question :)

Answer 1

What if one person downvotes a question but I like the question? How can I actively show my support if not by an upvote?

Also, how do we give incentives to write good questions? I think we should keep upvotes to reward good behaviour (good questions).