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Possible Duplicate:
Why aren’t people voting for questions?

G'day,

I've noticed that over the last couple of months that interesting questions aren't voted up at all. Just the answers seem to receive any votes if any.

Any thoughts on why?

I thought we were supposed to vote up both interesting questions, because they made us think about things, and also excellent answers, because they provided us excellent information?

Edit: Why the vote down? A good question should be rewarded as well as good answers should be? Given Jeff's edit to the question linked below I think we should be rewarding insightful and interesting questions. That question linked below is a dupe but given it was asked quite a while ago, and that this indifference is still going on, I think that this is still relevant.

Or is SO now dying and drifting away from Jeff and Joel's original ideas because of the unstoppable crowd factor as detailed by Clay Shirky?

sadly,

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  • See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9508/…
    – Shog9
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 17:24
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    Because all the questions have been asked... Everything is now a dupe.
    – beggs
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 17:53
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    Regarding your edit: I down-voted this because it doesn't add anything to the existing question. If you think voting behaviors have changed, or something new has arisen, then give some proof - or at least, interesting anecdotes - to back that up.
    – Shog9
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 18:18
  • I voted down because of the arrogance of assuming that this is some uniquely new phenomenon, when even a cursory glance around shows that people have been claiming this as a problem since the very early days of the site. It's also a dup.
    – Paul Tomblin
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 19:03
  • @Paul, arrogance? It has been increasingly a factor for awhile now. But what would I know, I've only been here since being a beta tester.
    – Rob Wells
    Commented Jan 18, 2010 at 16:14

3 Answers 3

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Stopped? When did we start? Look at Why aren't people voting for questions? - which was originally asked in August 2008, a year and a half ago.

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The short answer is because a lot of questions either suck, or they are pretty basic ones that don't ask anything compelling or thought-provoking. This is, I think, not because there are no interesting questions to ask, but simply because most of the user base is at the basic/beginner level so those are the types of questions we will see most.

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    Unfortunately it's the basic questions that are the real rep drivers. No matter how many times someone asks how come string.Replace() isn't working in c#, the first one to post "strings are immutable" is going to get at least 10 votes.
    – womp
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 18:13
  • womp: said another way: it's easy to up-vote or down-vote answers to "easy" questions, while answers that require thought are often much harder to vote on.
    – Gnome
    Commented Jan 3, 2010 at 18:16
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Maybe it is a positioning thing.

Interesting questions tend to be lengthier than any of their answers. I find that I finish the question, and start scrolling down to view the answers. When I like an answer, I upvote it, as the answer is normally short, and the upvote box is right next to my eyes when I finish reading the answer.

I never really think to upvote the question, as the page tends to flow downwards, and by the time I've finished reading the question, I've normally scrolled down enough that the voting box is no longer in my view.

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