Something I have noticed over the years is that interesting, and difficult, questions do not get upvotes. My biggest slew of upvote points was for answering an insanely easy question about voltages and resistors, and the question itself was trivial schoolwork related with lots of upvotes.
I doubt there is any way to fix this even if the will existed, but has it been considered?
I think difficult questions are more likely to asked by more experienced people, and are much more likely to be quite narrowly focused. The question itself may be difficult to understand.
There are millions upon millions of "beginners" doing a 1st year course in physics or engineering who would love someone to give them the answer to yet another voltage divider question. These questions probably get more views, and then hit the HNQ and get even more views.
The pool of users "qualified" to vote on an in depth answer to a specialist question is correspondingly smaller as well. There are plenty of topics I have no clue about, and I wouldn't recognise a good answer from a completely incorrect one. It seems inappropriate to vote either way on those ones.
I'm in the same boat - lots of upvotes for things which seem obvious but of much more general interest. I say bank the votes, after all you are helping a lot of people and that's really the point (right?). Then enjoy answering/asking more interesting questions.
There are many things that affect the voting on a question. This is dependent on the interest in the question and many factors affect this. Sometimes it's the amount of people that actually look at the question (or the people that are actually around to see the question as this varies from day to day).
There isn't a good way to fix this other than to remind the community that they should vote when possible and take the time to upvote good questions.
Difficult questions (that have a more limited audience) just don't pay the SE bills as much as trivial questions (that have a much wider audience) hence, SE may not care as much about bigger and more important questions that the great unwashed will never likely comprehend.
OK, so traffic pays the bills and that traffic migrates towards the dumb-stuff. It's therefore not in SE's interest to award a greater rep score when answering difficult questions (just in case the great unwashed start to turn away from this site due to perceptions of elitism).
But, on the other hand, it might naturally turn SE into yet another website for banal questions. Is there a danger here? I think there is and, I think that the balance has gone a little too far in favouring the hobbyist/school-kid mentality. If I rant on about making sure your supplier has a good quality system, the hobby "buy it from ebay" brigade will just fall-over giggling.
More fool them of course.
But, where exactly to draw the line?
A bias against difficult questions is one thing, suppression them is totally different and that occurs
It's one thing to farm "internet points" from easy questions (my highest voted answer is "what is a sine wave" ??? ) and hold out for interesting questions.
However, what isn't fine is when regulars vote down valid questions and vote to close valid questions simply because they do not understand what is even being discussed
I am using this as an example (note there are others) as I am extremely disappointed by the regulars to this site. Voting to close because "Opinion" when it is a power and control technical question. Disappointing, really... I expect a lot more from people here.
Need help with simulation of three-phase rectifier with hysteresis controller
I think this site needs to ask itself... does it want to be a collection of rehashed questions around "what is a voltage divider" or does it actually want to collect answers..
So lets see... to vote down a question you need a MINIMUM of 125 points to VOTE down and there are 12190 meeting that criteria. HOWEVER... you need 3000 points to be able to vote-close and there is 989 users meeting that criteria (ie regular type users).
If one of these 989 think such a question is 1) Opinionated 2) not suited here then EE.SE has a serious problem and the rewarding simple answers to attract those who only know simple questions has turned this place into the 5 monkeys experiment
CONGRATULATIONS moderators and Stackoverflow, you have changed this place into a zoo
