Are SharePoint.SE users lazy voters?

Question

Since I just found the "Unsung Hero" badge in my profile, I had a little peruse of answers, votes, accepts, etc. in my various other accounts and I'm starting to build a theory: Compared to the other SE sites I participate in, members at SharePoint.stackexchange seem to be comparatively shy to vote.

An answer with 2 upvotes shows in my top 5 list in the profile. There are many of my answers with just one upvote, and then there are the many answers with no upvotes, even though enough of them have been marked as answers to earning me that Unsung Hero badge.

Does anyone else with accounts in other sites feel that voting seems to be less practiced here? If so, what could be the reason for that?

Answer 1

Yes, absolutely.

I myself come from UX.SE where there is a strong community, few questions a day, design and not implementation questions where opinions matter as much as facts. Everyone can participate and have an idea of an answer to the question. UX people read a lot.

SP.SE is the opposite. A weak community (chat is dead), many questions a day, very specific implementation questions where facts is everything. SP people google a lot, scan text and snippets in the pursuit of solving the problem at hand.

Personally I think it's a bad thing, but I've accepted it and continue to post. This is just a way of how this "community" works. I'd love to participate to make this a stronger community. I'm here for one purpose only - to improve my SharePoint skills by asking and answer questions.

---

Encourage voting

One way to encourage voting could be to run a competition for a period of time, and users who meet a certain goal will win a check on Amazon to buy SharePoint related books. It's easy to measure on this list: https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/users?tab=voters&filter=all

---

Comparison

On the above mentioned list, there are 17 pages of users who have placed a vote at any time. The number of users on this site add up to 270 pages. 6,3 % of our users have placed at least one vote. That's a problem.

Answer 2

Yes.

It sometimes seems like people will sooner write a chatty "me too" non-answer or comment than simply up-vote. I see questioners comment on an answer about how helpful it was, and how it solved their problem, but the answer remains stubbornly unaccepted and with zero votes. An up-vote just means "helpful". You get 40 a day - use them!

When it comes to down-voting people seem even more reluctant. Often I see answers flagged disapprovingly as being poor quality, wrong, etc. but not down-voted. Perhaps they fear losing the minuscule amount of reputation that results from down-voting. I have no such qualms. A down-vote just means "unhelpful" - it's not personal.

Voting is key to how StackExchange works in order to get the good answers to the top. SharePoint stack exchange is a democracy - use your vote!

Answer 3

I upvote more questions than answers as I'm still a relative newbie. I think people refrain from upvoting a question as on it's own it doesn't seem as "useful" as an answer but it's nice to know you're not the only one stuck on the same problem!

I've used more upvotes then I have rep which seems to be unusual!

Answer 4

I think there is a lot of factors that in play here:

It's a small community
If you use the measure of people with reputation above 200 (which is what StackExchange track in the leagues) as a measure for the size of the community.

Then we have 636 users and StackOverflow has 159,521, and as @dava-wise mentions more people gives more votes.

Rather many questions
Within the last 24 hours 47 new questions has been posted. I think that it's very few users who read all the questions.

SharePoint is a complex product
In general on SE there is a tendency of the more complex a question/answer is the less votes it get. In some cases it's hard to see if the question is specific the OPs environment or is a "valid" question.
And often it's very hard to verify that the answer is correct without doing some investigation.

We're bad users
I must admit that my reason for being active on SP.SE isn't to help people (sorry). I'm here to learn and become a better SharePoint professional.
The way I personally learn best isn't by reading what other people write, but by trying things myself and then trying to explain that to other people.
So when I prioritize my time on SP.SE, I go for trying to answer questions that looks interesting and have no good answer.

BUT we should improve
After all of these excuses I'll agree, that in order to continue to build the community we should become better at voting.

Answer 5

It may be beneficial to state that it's more that SharePoint is less of a primary role/responsibility and they are only on SP.SE because they need an answer to a specific project or task, they don't LIVE in SharePoint; it's a side project. It's a system administrator configuring SharePoint, end-users using SharePoint, or .NET developers diving into SharePoint.

Answer 6

Yes: Sharepoint is the Stack Exchange site where people vote the least. You can see the numbers from this Data Explorer query (warning: it's somewhat expensive, because each site is stored in its own database). Here are the top sites, the median site, and the bottom sites in terms of average votes per post. The vote count includes both upvotes and downvotes.

Site                     Posts     Votes   V/P
Skeptics                 13098    199242 15.21
Meta                    187089   1864540  9.97
Mythology                  681      6447  9.47
Programmers             163212   1512717  9.27
Academia                 34666    315578  9.10
Workplace                32609    295316  9.06
Cstheory                 18480    164439  8.90
Scifi                    70101    623935  8.90
Earthscience              2752     23205  8.43
Aviation                 10930     88055  8.06
…
Islam                    11403     45371  3.98
…
Sound                    27229     52181  1.92
StackOverflow.Ja          9100     17106  1.88
Drupal                  119098    206271  1.73
Arduino                   8313     14068  1.69
Wordpress               132973    200338  1.51
Expressionengine         23030     33656  1.46
Magento                  50598     66144  1.31
StackOverflow.Ru        150479    184540  1.23
Rus                      25115     29916  1.19
Sharepoint              118349    136019  1.15

Generally speaking, technology sites have less voting, and CMS sites less voting among technology sites, and Sharepoint has less voting than any other site. The numbers haven't changed significantly in the last two years; Sharepoint has always been at the bottom of the pack. The voting rate was 1.22 in Feb 2013, 1.18 in July 2014, down to 1.15 in July 2015, which seems to be a slight downward trend.

Sharepoint.SE is middling in terms of up/down vote ratio.

Answer 7

Yes, I just wanted to ask the same question here and found yours.

I also have the feeling, that in other Stack Exchange sites, people are much more using voting than here on Sharepoint.SE.

That's a pity, especially for new users, as they do not get enough reputation to really participate. I've asked a question and I even don't have the possibility to upvote helpful answers or comments. :-(

Answer 8

Yes, absolutely.

SharePoint developer having mentality of.

"Rather than burning hours of time writing the underlying frameworks, they can take what the Platform gives them and invest that time in extra functionality."

That's why i believe SharePoint developers are lazy.

Answer 9

Yes - People vote the least in SharePoint.stackexchange.com

I didn't know we can vote or the meaning of voting after a while, maybe we can have a clear(simpler) page for beginner.