Observation: Up-Voting appears to be more much rare here than on SU

Question

I've seen y'all are wary of suspect upvoting patterns here on SF: Upvoting without discretion

But I've also noticed that even on questions with several comments, upvotes are very rare. Full disclosure, I've observed this on my questions and have not spent any significant amount of time looking for it on others questions.

I've asked 20 questions here on SF, 10 of them have no upvotes at all, three of these have nearly or more than 100 views, several have answers and most have at least comments.

It gives the site a bit of a cold demeanor and frankly is a bit frustrating.

I in no way request or condone compelling people to up vote and I do not necessarily want people to up vote my questions if they don't have another reason to outside my bringing this up.

However, being willing to up vote more freely should help warm this place up a bit and make it more welcoming.

Of course, that may be exactly the vibe all y'all BOFH's are trying to avoid...

Answer 1

Although I think more voting (up and down) would be a good thing, I don't think it should be done to make SF "warmer" and more welcoming.

I think one reason for low voting is that professional sysadmins usually don't have time and money to do everything, so we prioritize quickly and harshly. When people see a question that's not bad enough to downvote, but not clear or complete enough to answer, they probably move on or maybe leave a comment asking for more information.

This makes the bar for "good" questions quite high: questions have to be on-topic, and they have to be clearly expressed and have something interesting about them to get someone to upvote. Looking at some of your questions, I think there are two main reasons they might not be getting upvotes:

• More obscure topics (like Notes, also HP-UX or VMS) are going to get less interest. Your question about disconnecting users from files on your NAS box might fall into that category.

• I'm not sure how to express this, but there's something about your questions that makes them seem unclear to me. There's lots of information in them (in one case I think the question is simply too long), but for me, at least, it's hard to figure out exactly what's being asked, what you've tried, what supporting information you have. I can see most of that information is in the question, but it doesn't jump out at me.

Answer 2

I was just looking at a random sampling of some of your 0 score questions and, honestly, I'd be tempted to downvote a few of them, or even cast close votes.

The hover-text for the upvote arrow says "This question shows research effort; it is useful and clear."

We tend to upvote well thought-out and thoroughly detailed questions. It seems that some of your zero score questions are more like one or two liners without a lot of detail. Sure, they can probably be answered, but they're generally not great quality. the definition of "useful and clear" varies from site to site, especially clear. We expect a high level of detail, since our jobs require it.

Also, we have many specializations in our field. A storage specialist that stumbles on an AD question that he thinks he might be able to help with may leave a comment for clarification, but may not feel qualified to judge whether or not it's worthy of an upvote.

That said, we probably could vote a little more overall. The problem is that most of the regulars on meta do already vote quite a bit, so this might be falling on deaf ears.

Answer 3

^{(Bit too much for a comment)}

The reason I'm a rare upvoter is that often I don't understand what's being asked - I've only a few year's worth expereince so sometimes I find it difficult to tell the difference between a technically pleasing (i.e. looks right but is operationally frowned upon) and an actual good answer.

I'll always upvote a question or answer that shows a lot of research effort - but if you see a 2-line question with comments underneath such as "post logs" and "what have you tried" (which we do get a fair amount here) then I don't see why anyone should put the effort into voting for a poor question when the effort on the OP's part is minimal.

I don't know if this is the general consensus with the SF community but I guess rep is harder to earn here because it can be a very narrow, specalised field compared to that at SU.

Answer 4

SF is different to its sister sites because it is intended for professionals only. It therefore has a different type of user. Not only do we expect a much higher standard of expertise than SU or SO, both of which cater to everyone form the newest newbie to the best of the best, we're also generally not the kind of people to be throwing compliments (read: upvotes) about unless they have been earned. If truth be told, many of us don't even like humans in general, which tends to be reflected in our attitudes to everything, including voting.

In contrast, have a look at the appalling questions and answers, many of them utterly wrong, which get massive numbers of upvotes on the other sites. Posts of a similar level would get closed or downvoted to oblivion on SF. Even what might be considered a decent post on the other sites (adjusting for topic of course) may well get ignored or downvoted on SF just because we don't believe the poster has shown due diligence, something not required elsewhere.

Answer 5

I'll be the first to admit that I could and should vote more often.

In fact I go through phases when I try hard to do just that... and often find it extremely difficult to find questions that are worth voting up or down that I haven't already voted on. I am trying harder to vote on things that I think are worthwhile, but it turns out that is harder than I thought it would be.

And good answers are an area where again, I should vote more, but if I've already read the question and nothing happens to draw my attention back to it, I'm likely to miss the answers... so that great answer to an unpopular question is all too easily missed by me, and I suspect I'm not the only one. That's a shame and given that I have other things to do besides spend all day on SF trawling 'old' questions, I really don't know what to do about it.