Something about how mean people are with voting keeps it this way. It's just very hard to get a vote at all. I happened to get a gold badge today for 10k views on an old question. Of those 10k people 17 decided to upvote.
Possibly related: SO requires you reach some number of upvotes before you yourself can upvote. When I use SO and try to upvote a useful answer I'm always reminded that I don't have the privilege of upvoting.
This is (part of) why I upvote anything even remotely helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or doesn't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having the best formatted and/or written answer, asking a question I didn't know I had, and so on. I'm not a power SO'er, but I have some privileges and I do try to help the site be good.
It's kind of like Craigslist for me in that random people like me are also the source of poor-quality and low-effort participation, one-sentence or obviously-homework questions. However, I do realize the structure of the site and the Ponzi-like nature of voting there makes the n00b experience difficult if you want points and privileges. But at the end of the day, question choice and moderation are the comb and brush of informative crowd-driven sites.
That said, I assume there is plenty of action to be had if you're participating in cutting edge, new version, or new technology topics. Unfortunately that conflicts with the low-effort/homework population who I assume are constrained by their curriculum and so they have only C++ questions to ask. By that token I wonder how many questions even remain to be asked of common and popular topics like Java. It could just be that SO is "full" in certain topics.
The way to grow an economy is to participate in the economy, but this acquistion is no doubt going to change things for me.
I also speculate that there's a certain mindset that sees unmonetized ratings (or even points) as a market failure, which is what generated acquisition interest.
> This is (part of) why I upvote anything even remotely helpful, explaining that some command switch does (or doesn't do) X, or syntax clarification, or even having the best formatted and/or written answer, asking a question I didn't know I had, and so on.
I recall listening to the stackoverflow podcast and Jeff was asked about his threshold for upvoting.
I recall he said he upvoted something like all answers that were nor spam. Since, people are trying to help for no benefit to themselves, so why wouldn't you at least give them that?
I have given up on participating on SO because more often than not I am told I don't have enough reputation to do something (I don't know if it's commenting or giving an answer or giving an upvote but there are some questions for which answers are wrong or need some updates and I can't participate. So I just don't by default. I think I can't upvote on some stack and I find this weird).
I'm with you. I've never had an active account on StackOverflow. I created an account once or twice after coming across a question where the "accepted" answer was incorrect, or where it was badly missing something about the big-picture, and I was appalled to find that they don't let new accounts answer questions -- you have to comment or upvote (or something?) before you gain the right to answer a question.
Fuck that. I'm not going to waste my time farming karma for the privilege of answer questions for complete strangers that I happen to know the answer to. The moderation on stackoverflow is a complete mess -- it reminds me of the powertripping that you see on Wikipedia, but maybe even worse because there's far less room for interpretation when most of the questions are technical in nature.
You need 15 points to up vote which means you need to have received 2 up-votes yourself on either a question or answer or have edited 7 questions/answers and had those approved. It's quite easy to hit those numbers. Once you have 1000 points (I think) on any site and you join a new site you get 100 points by default which means you always have those base privileges wherever you are.
Well, not low enough for me. After a few attempts to answer some questions early on, I gave up. Read only for me. I don't even remember what the problem was.
Why making contributing difficult and consuming easy? I guess it worked for them. Counterintuitive, but nice jackpot.
Because contributing has no value unless your contribution is actually good, and often there's a lot of crap that's negative value because it's wrong or off-topic or spam.
No idea, but I was just trying to answer some questions. I remember vaguely that I needed some points to help and I needed to help to get the points, so... I shrugged and let it be.
The first post on SO for most accounts tend to be from Newbs. The people see the question and think Read The Fucking Manual and downvote. Then you have zero karma and you can't do anything else.
The problem is that the Newb doesn't even know where to start in the manual.
I'm someone with 15+ facebook accounts and who knows how many stackoverflow accounts. I don't really care. And if I try to comment and don't have the 15 points then I just leave.
You can comment without any problem. Downvoting is not the main usage of HN, like answering questions is on SO (or commenting, it's a wonder that they still allow any kind of activity for people without karma, too bad the only allowed activity is making questions, that will be incorrectly marked and downvoted most of the time).
I suspect it's because so many people use SO for work. When I'm at work I'm not thinking about being a good SO user and upvoting a good question or answer, I'm focused on getting my answer and getting back into the flow of my work.
On the other hand if I'm casually browsing twitter or instagram I'll gladly like posts that are interesting and there's no cost because it's recreation time.
This person has freely put in the effort to provide a solution to a problem you have at work, and you can't even be bothered to click the upvote button?
Also, maybe this is just because I'm just a forgetful idiot, but on numerous occasions upvoting has proven beneficial to me. I'll be searching for the solution to a problem and I find that I've already upvoted a question which relates to my issue - then if there's an answer I've upvoted, that's probably going to be the best one.
Can't upvote on SO without spending ??? hours farming karma. People start answers with "don't have enough reputation to comment, but in response to the other answer [...]". Left the only answer on several questions, probably averaging 0.2 upvotes per answer.
My high priority work questions: mostly no answers, even years later. I wrote a self answer, years later one or zero upvotes.
I ask a question with an example, the only answer "solves" the example and ignores the question, I self answer correctly when I figure it out on my own, years later no upvotes.
Several questions I arrive from Google are closed without an answer, or duplicate to a completely offtopic question. Or it's an XY question where I still need an answer for X but I don't have the secret question Y.
If you're not actively gaming SO for karma, it can be kind of a wasteland for anything but read only.
Oh yeah, if you don't have enough karma to upvote then I totally agree (especially if you've put in the effort). I was assuming that you had upvote privileges.
I wonder how many of those 10,000 views were from logged in users? I’m guessing there are a lot of people who use Stack Overflow without ever creating an account.
Not completely true. I’m active on SO and other stack exchange sites as a consumer and bookmark tons of questions. They sync with https://Larder.io for me too. I can’t upvote though.