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I would really like to see the community vote more often around here.

Reasons for upvoting more.

  • It makes the site look good to have upvoted questions because that means people are involved. To see a bad example of this consider the Joomla site. where the highest voted question on the home page has 3 upvotes.

  • It gets questions onto the Hot Network Questions list, which brings in lots of new users and votes and visitors to the site.

  • It encourages people to come back and provide more content and be active on the site with all of the things that don't result in rep like flagging/editing/reviewing.

  • More upvotes means more rep to spend on downvotes and bounties for difficult questions.
  • It encourages people to really take the time to research things and write excellent answers. (rep is how we pay people for their efforts)

  • It increases the number of users with the ability to moderate the site and spread the work out.

    • Right now questions aren't being closed because not enough people are reviewing them before the votes age out.
    • Doubly so for reopening questions.
    • Some of the spam/rude/really poor answers are taking a while to be reviewed.

    • The faster an edit is approved, the more likely a person is to suggest more (I hate waiting 48 hours to find out if an edit was approved/rejected)

    • We could use more users with the ability to delete the junk that gets posted on here every so often.

    • More rep means more available flags.

    • We could use more users with full editing privileges to help clean up the site.

    • Part of site graduation means the privilege levels go back to normal, which will reduce the number of users with those privileges. I don't think we would be able to graduate if it would sharply cut down on the user based moderation on the site.

Reasons to downvote more

  • Anytime you flag an answer as Very Low Quality or Not An Answer it's worth downvoting as a negative score makes it eligible for deletion and more likely that your flag is marked helpful.
  • Some answers don't actually answer the question.
  • Some users post walls of text that make your eyes bleed.
  • Some answers are flat out wrong.
  • Some answers just restate other answers.

Reasons to review more.

  • The faster we can close and reopen questions the better. Otherwise, we risk invalidating answers posted before closing and discouraging people from fixing their questions to be on topic.
  • Encourage more people to suggest edits which improve the quality of the posts.
  • Quickly remove the spam/rude posts (this is pretty rare, but when it does happen, we ought to burn it with fire)
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    Added featured tag for a bit - to get some visibility
    – Rory Alsop Mod
    Commented Mar 29, 2018 at 19:05
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    You can tell this is important to me! As of this writing, I've upvoted over 10,000 times, which makes me the highest since the site began. That's close to double the next few and I've only been here 3 awesome years, and have contributed much less content than most! However, I may not have been as discriminating with my votes as I should have been. I've only downvoted a few posts, but maybe I should do more of that, for the reasons you stated. I want my votes to be based on quality, not just quantity.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Commented Mar 29, 2018 at 22:02
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    I also think users should be scrupulous about accepting. Sometimes no answer really answers the question, but I've found that most of my questions bring forth an answer that I am happy to accept.
    – ab2
    Commented Mar 29, 2018 at 22:24
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    @ab2 That's an excellent point. I'd add though that sometimes acceptance comes too fast, and people write better answers later. Early acceptance can also deter people from adding an answer, because it won't have a chance of being accepted. The number of answers per question is a statistic SE looks at too.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Commented Mar 29, 2018 at 22:25
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    @Sue I don't particularly care if people know that I upvoted them :)
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Commented Mar 30, 2018 at 0:16
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    Related: Please consider upvoting the questions you answer.
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Commented Apr 5, 2018 at 20:10
  • Wow. I wasn't aware I was one of the top voters. Anyway, do you think we have a problem with lack of votes? Or are you suggesting it as an action to increase the community size? (or both)
    – Roflo
    Commented Sep 3, 2018 at 20:34
  • @Roflo I would say both
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Commented Sep 4, 2018 at 15:28

2 Answers 2

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While I think this is a great post (+1) and there is clearly room for more voting (up, down, questions, answers, close, open), I think we need to be clear it best to vote appropriately, don't vote just for the sake of voting.

I also feature strongly on the User by vote list, I don't try and vote on every post, I don't try to vote if I don't understand the question and/or the answer, I don't vote (up or down) if the post is mediocre.

If I am voting down or close, I try to post a comment on why (or upvote an existing comment that indicates the issue)

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    Yup. A lot of times I don't vote because the topic isn't my thing, so it's hard to know the good stuff from the bad.
    – Olin Lathrop
    Commented Apr 2, 2018 at 12:03
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As a rule of thumb, if I decide to invest any time into a question, be it providing an answer or leaving a comment, then I feel obligated to provide an upvote for the question as well.

If you take the time to read through a question, and you feel like you might be somewhat interested in knowing the answer, or you provide an answer, then take the time to upvote the question.

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    Also, if someone invests time in answering your question, you should upvote the answer.
    – Charlie Brumbaugh
    Commented Apr 6, 2018 at 3:55
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    @CharlieBrumbaugh I generally agree, if it's a decent answer, but not all answers should be upvoted simply because someone invested time into composing them, but I would agree you should vote on each answer you receive, be it an up or downvote.
    – ShemSeger
    Commented Apr 7, 2018 at 4:44

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