The Serverfault community seems to treat questions differently than other SE sites... and there definitely seems to be a "culture" or general understanding on how to treat questions that isn't immediately clear.

• Generally speaking, why is a question upvoted or downvoted here?

• Should I interpret any meaning based on the value of the upvote / downvote?

• Is this site just for the "elite" and N00bs can just go their own way.

Friends who I sent to Serverfault got the impression it wasn't too friendly of a place, and stopped using it. In fact I think I remember seeing a similar Meta question & observation within the past 6 months by other users.

PS - I don't care about "rep" but I do care about finding questions that are well written (and responses). When I use the SE DataExplorer to scan through posts, I'd like to know what measurements (upvotes) I should filter by.

Your perspective is welcome.