Shouldn't we vote Q's & A's more?

Question

I don't think much upvoting is happening right now. Of course there are only around 80 questions at the moment, but if you look at Badges page statistics, it's not quite positive:

• Of 400 users, only a little less than 100 have earned the Supporter badge, meaning having done their first upvote;
• Less than a handful of users has a Suffrage and Vox Populi badge;
• Only 4 questions have scored 10 or more, also only 4 answers

Just sit down and take some time to browse through questions and spent your upvotes. Of course don't go upvote blindly. Always keep looking for quality and reward that quality.

Much upvoting will motivate beta participants and will stimulating a good upvote culture which contributes to a healthy website, now and in the future. Much upvoting will also create more high reputation users, who will have more privileges and thus more people to contribute in moderating the website.

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UPDATE:
To everyone reading this, there are some rules to voting. As I already mentioned, don't go vote blindly. Also do not vote on all the Q&A's of one user (like open up their profile page and vote on everything), because serial voting on a user is not allowed and will be corrected, see this answer below.

Pick a topic/tag you are interested in and upvote quality Q&A's and downvote poor ones.

If you would downvote, a question or an answer, then leave a comment! Leaving a comment will help the asker or answerer to improve and learn, which will increase the overall quality of this SE. After any edit of the question/answer you are allowed to change your vote: undo the downvote and maybe convert it to an upvote?

Answer 1

I'd revise your statement slightly: shouldn't we vote on questions and answers more? [in either direction!]

The oft-quoted blog post for this is Vote Early, Vote Often, and the advice really is important on a private beta site like this - all the features of the site (privileges, sorting of answers, badges) stop working properly when the system isn't getting input on whether posts are good or not.

Don't be scared about downvoting posts that aren't useful (link-only answers, poorly researched questions and other low quality posts) - I personally would love to see the site have high standards for questions and answers, so voting is critical to reward good content and discourage bad content.

Answer 2

As someone who committed as a Beginner or Learner, I vote on the questions and answers I understand, which means at the moment I limit myself to conceptual questions. I skip most of the "how do I do X in Jenkins" and similar questions, because I don't have a way (yet) to correctly judge the questions and answers.

I do try to read as many questions and answers as possible, in order to learn and get familiar with things.

Answer 3

I agree with the ontent of your question, though there are a few things in it that I wanted to complete ...

spent your upvotes.

... ideally every day you can use up to 40 votes ... So if your profile says "last seen 2 days ago" (like currently is the case for 7ochem ...), that means you lost the opportunity for 80 votes ...

Of course don't go upvote blindly

... indeed, because nobody wants to be a victim of serial upvoting, like what earlier today seems to have happened to this poor user. And even though it could well be that after this poor user "did post a bunch of questions, someone may have found them usefull" (as in a comment below this answer), it is not allowed as per the rules about that (which "I" did not invent), and which are documented here:

When a single user continually votes (up or down) on many of your posts within a short period of time, the system considers these votes to be invalid and removes them. This could happen for a variety of reasons, such as a user finding a user's great answer and visiting all of their posts to upvote them, or a user getting into an argument with another user and downvoting their posts indiscriminately in revenge. No matter the cause, this sort of systematic targeted voting is not considered normal behavior and the system will not allow it.

Comment on downvotes!!!

Really, seriously, please! Any time I notice an anonymous downvote on any of my questions or answers, it makes me think like Gggggggrrrrrrr². Because IMO only motivated downvotes (by leaving a comment to motivate the downvote) is what counts: those are the ones that will challenge the user who created the question (or answer) to try to improve the post.

And then there are 2 types of anonymous downvotes:

• For questions ... which make me think like Gggggggrrrrrrr³. Because they are so cheap (the downvoter does not "have to pay" something like "-1" rep decrease, as is the case for downvotes of answers ...). My remedy for those = just ignore them (why bother, just move on).
• For answers ... but those don't even make me think like Gggggggrrrrrrr anymore. Simply because even though they should be anonymous, in reality they are not (not!) ... trust me.

Update

The poor user mentioned above is no longer alone ... yesterday I've been hit by a similar serial upvoter. If you're fast enough and go check the weekly top-voters page, you can see 1 user ... who yesterday had 40 votes (heading for a special badge?), but since the voting corrected from this morning got reduced again to 32 votes (only). 8 votes withdrawn, that seems to match with my rep decrease of 8 (serially) upvoted questions this morning. Now what, shouldn't the poor user above (and me too?) be rewarded with some badge that we recovered from a serial upvoting attack? BTW: how does such serial upvoter get corrected, eg via some temporary voting ban?