Why the upvotes?

Question

I realize I may be a bit less forgiving than others. However, I'd like to ask why some questions are getting so many up votes?

Questions which are litterally....

How do I do this in [ApplicationX]?
[image]

There's no effort shown whatsoever. Not even a cursory explanation of how a user thinks they may be able to accomplish this. It's purely a "please provide a tutorial for this image" question. Yet they always seem to get at least one, if not multiple, up votes.

Am I missing some reason these questions are deserving of up votes?

I'm not suggesting all of these are worthy of down votes, but they certainly are not deserving of up votes. If every poor, low effort question gets up votes, why bother with voting at all?

• How to make this strange embossed apple logo?
• Hello. How can I make this effect in illustrator?
• How to stack animated gifs?
• How to get this rough grain effect on photoshop?

Answer 1

Some reasons why people voted up such questions:

• They wanted to ask the same (or similar) question, and now they don't need to think how to formulate it, because they found it done, so they are genuinely thankful that someone do the work for them.

• They accidentally found

  • the nice answer, or
  • the answer to their own problem, or
  • the interesting feature or workflow, about which they didn't know previously, and which may be useful for them in the future,

  so they are thankful not only to the answerer, but also to the OP of the question for giving an opportunity for such a useful answer.

Answer 2

Not all voters are necessarily big GD users. A person mostly hanging on stackexhange or a person who just wants to know the answer, might look at this differently.

Of the questions the apple effect one is somewhat genuinely interesting. Although i haven voted because it does not show any effort. Note this post is on the hot list so expect it to have a lot of up votes.

In the end they are voting the way they want this site to be used, while you are voting the way you want. Our core user base is now just so low that our own voice is being overshadowed by those who want us to be graphix help channel. See ultimately there are 2 kinds of users those that seek answers and those that answer. They also have different voting patterns.

So I would say we should try to vote worthy questions more so that 2 votes seems like a rotten deal.

Answer 3

This complaint is a recurring issue: you are hardly the first to dislike tutorial-on-demand answers, nor the first to post about them.

Case in point:

• What to do with tutorial requests? -- part II
• Changing how we handle low-effort and tutorial-on-demand questions
• Why do how-to requests bother you?
• Why is everything suddenly "too broad"?

The outcomes of these Meta posts, especially the first one, is that low-effort, tut-on-demand questions are apparently a desirable aspect of this community.

No, I don't agree either. Yes, I hate them too. You can choose to get annoyed over them or shrug and move on. I chose the latter.

Answer 4

What I feel: Sometimes I've seen design questions which has done effort and are less like 'how to do this in photoshop' don't get any support, whereas a very basic question about 'how to do this in photoshop' gets 3-4-5 upvotes.

I'm not talking about my own questions. I've just observed it in past. I can't provide links as I don't remember now.

One reason is I guess users are offline on some days and question gets less views. While some other similar question gets 'lucky' get gets the support.

Support is fine, but in the end we see the difference and wonder why it happened.

Also, someone experienced on a different SE once told me that SE is run by community, not by a single user. So it's not really in our hand. It depends on how community takes it.