First of all
I'm sorry for this post which will sound a bit polemical, but I'd like to raise this problem because I really like this site and I'm starting to care about it.
Maybe this post will make someone unhappy or bring me haters, but I can sacrifice for my homeland :).
Straight to the point
Why don't we like to vote posts, and complain when we don't get upvoted?
This may not sound fair, but let's give some numbers: this are the votes of the top 8 users on EE.
User Votes Member for
-------------------------------------------
stevenvh 1109 1y 6m
Olin Lathrop 373 11m
Russel McMahon 340 1y 2m
Leon Heller 734 2y 6m (16 up, 718 down!)
Joby Taffey 982 2y 3m
David Kessner 58 1y 2m
Just Jeff 1285 2y 1m
Kevin Vermeer 3798 1y 11m
Now, for comparison, these are the top 8 on the big brother, SO:
User Votes Member for
-------------------------------------------
Jon Skeet 11831 3y 8m
Darin Dimitrov 1900 3y 7m
Marc Gravell 17948 3y 8m
BalusC 12579 2y 9m
Hans Passant 6261 3y 8m
SLaks 6193 3y 6m
VonC 10679 3y 8m
Greg Hewgill 6390 3y 9m
EDIT: another interesting fact is that we have 9 user with the Electorate
badge, while SO has 1967 (again, age and total number of users/questions counts, but still...). Civic duty
counts 59 versus 13551.
Now, I understand that SO has much more posts to vote, and these users have been active for longer, given more answers and in the end have about the same votes/answers ratio.
But: shouldn't we consider to encourage more voting (positive or negative) to make the system work more efficiently, rewarting good questions and answers and pushing them to the top?
I think that giving more votes would encourage people to give good answers, and at the same time help the users in understanding good answers from the rest, and trusting them more. We would also have higher reputation average, showing that the site is active and working.
UPDATE: No way that I'm collecting statistics again but TeX.SE has a better votes to questions ratio than us, and I'd say it's going very well.