>Why don't you an active member of Server Fault bother to vote on people's answers1?

I guess it's this:

- I usually only view questions I personally care about, which by the time I wade through all the stuff that's not a favorite tag but shown to me anyway isn't too many. At this point I'm already pretty disengaged.

- I usually care about questions which I find interesting also.

- I usually find them interesting because I don't know the answer myself.

- Which means I can't really upvote the answer as I don't know that it's correct.

Sometimes I'll enter questions I know the answer to and upvote the correct answer or drop an answer myself if no one else has, but only really when I actively decide to do a spell on SF. The majority of the 3-4 times a day I drop by I'm looking for interesting questions on lunch break, or before / after hours. In those instances the non-favorite tagged questions just obscure anything I cared about in the first place. I *believe* there's a specific url you can use to filter that stuff out, but that's roughly about the point I stop caring and just go onward to the next website.

I guess that personally SF is a place I primarily come to for learning. Answering and helping people is a nice side effect, but the main reason I'm here is to see the answers to things I didn't already know and try and gain knowledge. That gravitates me towards answers I can't actually upvote.