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I think we are off to a great pace, voting-wise. Questions and answers are receiving a high-number of votes, which is a very good thing. On that note, I'm going to relay a message on the tex.SE meta site by Scott Morrison:

I'm a moderator from MathOverflow, and this "question" is actually unsolicited advice, based on our experience from the initial launch of MathOverflow.

We should encourage everyone to vote positively as often as possible!

Every Stack Exchange site will eventually end up with a different "base level" of voting --- that is, the expected number of upvotes for a question of a given level of excellence. (This effect occurs because people see a good question, but already with a certain number of votes, and think "oh, I would have upvoted this, but it already has enough".)

It's easy for us to affect this "base level" by encouraging high levels of upvoting now. We're setting the standards, and this really will have an effect.

(On MathOverflow, we were very active about this early on, specifically encouraging all the initial round of users to vote early and often. You can compare statistics, and see that the average vote total for a MathOverflow question is much higher than on any of the other SE 1.0 sites.)

In case it's not obvious: the rationale for wanting this base level to be high is that it provides better positive feedback to good contributors.

I believe our most closely-related Stack Exchange site, Home Improvement, suffers from low voter turnout. It would be a shame to fall into the same fate.

So far it looks like we are on the ball. Let's keep up the good work.

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    The site where I am most active also suffers from anemic voting. I don't know what the answer is to get people to vote is, but would like to see the current trend continue here at WW.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2
    Mar 18, 2015 at 20:43
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    One point I would like to add is that some of the questions I'm seeing upvoted are not very well-defined questions. Please also encourage others to clarify any points that are unclear, or, if it's permissible, edit the question yourself. (Hmm, that gives me an idea for a meta question.)
    – rob Mod
    Mar 19, 2015 at 0:24
  • @rob I do agree and it is possible I am guilty of those types of question myself. Everyone is still getting a feel here so flagging these and commenting on these questions would help discourage bad habits and help with building the site scope.
    – Matt
    Mar 19, 2015 at 14:43

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Yes, I agree, and in private you tend to start higher, and it will likely drop a little. (at least that is what happened on Worldbuilding) but it is coming back up again. Everyone gets 30 (40 max) votes a day use them for those that you feel did a good job asking or answering.

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  • I would like to see more voting in this community as well. SO for example if you answer and get more than 2 votes its a miracle.
    – Matt
    Mar 19, 2015 at 14:45
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I'm currently very active at Magento.SE which has a poor voting culture. The downside of that is quite obvious, let's put those negative effects here as positive hints:

  1. Upvoting makes new visitors into returning users. New users asking their first question will feel appreciated and will gain reputation rapidly which gives them more privileges and will make them participate more actively.
  2. To make it out of beta into a full blown SE, you'll need a good answer rate. Therefor you need votes on answers.
  3. Having a good voting culture makes it a real community instead of a competition about earning rep
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    More than one answer per question should be highly encouraged, though I doubt that will be an issue for the site. Once we get through the "easy" questions, there will be a lot more questions which will be harder and have more than one good answer. I suspect we will see an average of between 3-4 APQ, but that's just my approximation. More than one way to skin a cat, or in this case, more than one way to plane a board.
    – Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2
    Mar 18, 2015 at 20:48
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Slightly off-topic, but in the same vein:

I mentioned it yesterday, but I'm pretty active at Stackoverflow, and the answer acceptance rate over there seems abysmal. There's a comfort level in seeing that little green check box - it helps to know that someone found this answer actually useful.

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