Would it ever make sense to award a small amount reputation based on responses? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Should rewards for asking good questions be improved?

I've noticed (particularly with the larger scale sites) that there are a number of good questions that receive many answers, and yet no one bothers to up-vote the question. It seems that honoring a question with an answer is an implicit endorsement, so why not give a point or two per answer, so that folks in the community who ask good questions are not 100% dependent on people up-voting?

Edit:

I suggest that answering is an endorsement simply because you have already determined that it is worth your time to respond, and I assume you place some value on your time. This obviously doesn't apply in Meta, but elsewhere.

Maybe it would make sense to award 2 points per answer, and then if someone answering actually up-votes the question, you could give an additional 3.

Answer 1

I actually find that once a question gets past a certain number of answers, say 4 or 5, most of them do not deserve an up-vote let alone the questioner.

I normally end up up-voting the one person that's got it right and down-voting everyone else, who answered incorrectly or left the OP open to SQL Injection etc...

Just so everyone knows that I'm not an insane down-voter if the other answerers are correct(ish) just not as good I won't down-vote them.

Answer 2

Accepting an answer awards the asker with +2 rep.

However, many questions are simply bad or trivial and though they get good answers are in themselves not good and do not deserve upvotes. Why reward such questions?

The value proposition of Stack Overflow (and the other SE sites) is not simply in the question - it is in the answers. Those are the valuables (if we had thousands of really, really great questions, but no answers, would anyone care?).

Answer 3

It seems that honoring a question with an answer is an implicit endorsement.

Not at all. In fact, sometimes I answer bad questions simply because it's already gotten quite a few poor answers. It's a genuine regard for the OP, but not an endorsement of the post itself or it's value is to the site. In some cases, I will even downvote and answer.

I'm arguing that if the question is entirely poor and devoid of value, there would be no answers

...so why not give a point or two per answer, so that folks in the community who ask good questions are not 100% dependent on people up-voting?

I'm not sure what SE site you're talking about, but on SO the easy, obvious questions get loads of answers within the first 5 minutes. The more difficult ones tend to get less.

There should definitely be no reward for asking easy questions that attract tons of one-liner answers, which happens all the time on Stack Overflow. Very frequently, there are 3-4 identical answers to the same post because of how fast they come flooding in. People would often rather post an answer for some quick rep than vote to close (if applicable), and people often would rather ask a question then do research or debugging. That's just the sad truth.

The bottom line is, if people think the question is useful they will upvote it. Answering a question does not necessarily merit an automatic upvote.