How can we appreciate and encourage voters?

Question

In this answer shortly prior to We're Rewarding the Question Askers, I wrote

I feel it's better to put more effort into encouraging users to selectively upvote worthwhile questions. Make them stand out on the front page. Draw attention to good, effortful questions.

In my opinion, Skeptics.SE is the best example of this. If you ask a good question at Skeptics.SE, you're going to be flooded with upvotes! And the front page is filled with good questions.

Many sites have issues getting worthwhile questions upvoted:

1. On the smaller sites, users don't vote enough. I've seen it at both Islam.SE and Chinese.SE, which leads to issues with self-moderation.

2. On the massive sites, there are way too many questions to vote on them all. This is very clear at Stack Overflow and Math.SE. An effortful post is unlikely to be appreciated, so why bother putting in effort?

I'm absolutely on board that we should Reward the Question Askers, but I believe changing +5 to +10 is "meh". Increasing an arbitrary number is not encouraging (you could change it to +1000 and it won't feel any more rewarding): it's the fact that someone has upvoted. The fact that a human being has upvoted my post makes me feel like they've recognized the time and effort I spent writing it. It makes me want to write good questions again and again ("hmm... that question was well received, I guess I'll keep doing that").

So...

1. Please vote more! Upvote what you want to see more of, and downvote what you want to see less of. It works! Let's follow the lead of Skeptics.SE, to see how selective voting can make such a huge difference.

2. Voting encourages voting. Let's jump-start the chain reaction at the vote-sparse sites, and get users to feel like voting is normal site behavior.

3. Upvoting influences users. We can use upvotes to get users to think "I should keep doing that" (for one's own upvotes) or "how do I make my post like that?" (when observing other posts being upvoted).

Back in 2010, Jeff Atwood in Vote Early, Vote Often wrote:

Voting is so important that we belatedly realized we may not be doing enough to encourage new users to vote. But we’re trying to change that.

In my mind, voters are still vastly underappreciated. Of course, we need vote selectively (upvote good posts, downvote poor) for it to work. So finally to my question...

How can we appreciate and encourage voters?

Some brainstorming (I have nothing radical in mind; just reminders to voters that we appreciate their time spent on the valuable task of selectively upvoting and downvoting):

1. It would be nice to have a site-wide Stack Exchange blog post that says "thank you" to the voters. (No changes, just a simple thank you.)

2. Perhaps some minor reward after every 100 votes at each site (e.g. +10 reputation). Not enough to encourage pointless votes, but enough to say "thank you". Or perhaps even simply a message in the Achievements box which says "thank you".

I don't know if these are good ideas, but I'm hoping the community can come up with better ones.

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There's other questions about this, e.g. What is our reward for voting? What is the metric for voting? (10 years old), Are people too miserly with up votes? (10 years old), How to encourage voting on questions (10 years old), Should there be more incentive to upvote? (8 years old), How about a new badge for people who vote a lot? (8 years old), and Encourage people to "Pay it forward" (6 years old). None of them feel all that relevant to today's situation.

Failing to vote for questions was considered a serious problem for Stack Overflow: Why aren't people voting for questions? (11 years old; +879/-13). People used to care about this a lot; and at that time:

Stack Overflow, 11 years ago: Quoting from the above meta post:

• about 49% of questions have score of 0 or 1.
• another 21% of questions have a score of 2.

Stack Overflow, today: From this data explorer query:

• about 46% of questions have score of 0.
• about 22% of questions have a score of 1.
• about 10% of questions have a score of 2.

Well, hmm. That seems a pretty solid reason to, at the very least, revisit this topic.

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Please note How to encourage more voting? We have the answer (8 years old) is not a serious question, but a response to an April Fools Day joke involving unicorns. A serious version that proposes an animation when voting is Animation to encourage voting (8 years old).

Answer 1

You can start by raising the vote caps. I've had to ration votes the last two days and still hit the caps.

Answer 2

Solve the voting rep conundrum

Meta tends to reward the quick, easy to implement answer, but there is still value in identifying problems that need more eyes and more thought than can fit into a tiny box. With that in mind, here is one of those big issues that needs serious consideration.

Right or wrong, things you don't get rep for are perceived by a lot of people as things that aren't valued on Stack Exchange. No one knows if you've spent years upvoting every quality question and answer and downvoting every dangerously wrong answer.

That said, it's easy to imagine how getting rep for voting could backfire if implemented naively; it's not an easy Gordian knot to cut.

Edit: Since this answer was written the OP suggested +10 rep every 100 votes. That seems to break the feedback loop enough that it wouldn't be abused as much as a more immediate reward would be. On the other hand, it might not be enough feedback to encourage people who don't already vote to do so.

Answer 3

I see poor quality SO questions where more people are willing to post comments about how to improve the post than have downvoted it.

I guess the commenters don't want to be mean but want to give the asker a chance to improve their question. The desired improvement rarely happens.

Perhaps if it was easier to retract a downvote after a bad question has been improved, people would be more willing to down vote? Informing down voters that a post has been edited has been suggested before, but I've not been keen on it because the rate of worthless notifications might be too high.

Answer 4

Perhaps it would help to know where the votes come from.

It's not just your opinion that Skeptics SE posts get flooded with votes. Almost any way you slice the data, Skeptics comes out as the site with the highest average score. Look for example at the average score for (non-closed, non-deleted) posts starting in March 2019, by site: Skeptics posts average a score of 14.

...But when you look at the same data but without Hot Network Questions and their answers, Skeptics posts only have an average score of 6 (and it doesn't have the highest average any more). Most sites experience a drop like that between the two lists and the sites that don't either have practically no HNQ presence (e.g. Islam, Chinese) or are too big for HNQ to statistically matter (e.g. Stack Overflow, Math).

(In the case of Skeptics, having strict requirements for question/answer quality and deleting most everything that doesn't meet that is probably part of the reason why the site has such a high average score.)

The association bonus makes the HNQ ideal for getting a high density of votes (and also answers, which can in turn be voted up), but I think that other sites, like Reddit, can also help in this regard, particularly for smaller sites. If you see something you like, share it.

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P.S. The queries linked above were written by me (using a template for querying all sites created by rene), so let me know if there's some other way you'd like to see the data.