Our questions need more votes!

Question

We've discussed this before, but I think it needs to be brought up again.

I've seen a lot of questions lately that have several upvoted answers, but nary a vote on the question itself. (All of the below are prior to me voting, to be clear.)

• This question seems pretty decent and has an answer with two upvotes, but no votes on the question.

• This question is a bit controversial, but yet had zero votes either way while it has three answers with at least 4 people voting (or more). Clearly a lot of people are interested in this question - where are the votes on it?

• This question had zero upvotes as well with a four vote answer.

• This question had one vote on the question and lots of votes on the mediocre answers.

And that's just on the front page, while almost none of the new questions on the front page have more than a couple of votes on them. Torben's question from last week is the only one this month with more than 2 votes, and I only see three questions that are from the summer or later with more than 3 votes.

As those of you who have been around for a while probably know, question volume is what is largely keeping this site from taking off. We get plenty of answers on our questions, we have lots of high rep users, we have some good experts, but we just don't have enough questions. One of the best ways to improve in that department is to reward users who post good questions by voting them up.

I'd like to suggest that those of you providing answers please consider voting up any question you place an answer on. If you're going to answer the question, I'd like to think it's a good enough question to upvote, right? You're hopefully not wasting your time answering bad questions; so an upvote is appropriate most of the time.

And, of course, let's ask some more questions!

Answer 1

Your post motivated me to ask a question :) I just realized that I it would appear that I'm a perfect parent with all the answers since I hadn't asked a question yet.

I think I agree with Torben on the question up/down votes being anchored to the question itself. Is there any way we could maybe "freeze" the question title and up/down vote buttons in place at the top of the screen and have the rest of the page scroll? I know it can be done, but I'm not sure how much of a re-work it would be.

Maybe the site could push more notifications about upvoting the question. I remember seeing that notification once, but I cant remember what triggered it.

Answer 2

[sorry this is more of a comment than an answer, but too long]

As a user I sometimes is confused what voting up a question means.

Does it mean: This question is well written, and asks something within the site guidelines?

Does it mean: The question is really interesting?

Does it mean: I really want an answer to this too?

I feel sometimes this is conflicting. Usually I see some good questions in terms of how they are asked, but the question is trivial to me. Do I vote up?

Sometimes a question is asked in a terrible way, but the actual underlying question is of interest to me. Do I vote down? up?

This question has 24 upvotes, yet I personally think it is written in a rambly, long winded way ( I couldn't finish), and is barely within parenting topics. Furthermore, the title is a statement not a question.

I am puzzled, and as a user I don't really know when to vote up.

On stack overflow, I usually only vote up questions that are clear, well written and interesting. But there are so many questions that there will be some of these, here I feel I might need to upvote questions in all 3 categories above?