Why are there few votes?

Question

I don't know if it's only my impression, but I think that people don't vote.

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Edit: An interesting article about votes: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/10/vote-early-vote-often/

Answer 1

Just some notes on how important active participation (including voting) is on every site.

Voting is a Critical Part of Participation

Posting questions and answers is only half of the equation. Voting is what provides the vetting (examination and evaluation) of the answers on this site. Without it, there's no expertise; just random thought that may or may not be correct.

Voting is the Basis of Community Self-Policing

Without voting, you will not have users with enough reputation to keep the site running smoothly. Without editors (+2000 rep users), the on-going quality of the posts will suffer. Without closers (+3000 rep users), the site is always in danger of succumbing to spam and declining quality.

Soon, Voting May Be Critical to Getting out of Beta (Graduation)

Beta sites operate under reduced reputation requirements. When a site graduates from beta, the privilege levels return to their normal levels:

   15     Vote up
   15     Flag offensive
   50     Leave comments†
  100     Edit community wiki posts
  125     Vote down (costs 1 rep)
  150     Create new tags
  200     Reduced advertising
  200     Retag questions
  250     Vote to close, reopen, or migrate your questions
 1000     Show total up and down vote counts
 2000     Edit other people's posts
 3000     Vote to close, reopen, or migrate any questions
10000     Delete closed questions, access to moderation tools 

Under represented sites (with low-rep users) will struggle when the site graduates.

We are seriously considering basing the graduation requirements on having enough 2000- and 3000-rep users to sustain the site, and not a hard 90-day limit.

If a site cannot take care of themselves, they are not ready for graduation. If they reach that point before 90 days, they should be able to move on.

Answer 2

Interesting observation. Is it in fact a fact, though? Curious mind could extract number of votes of each user, normalize it somehow (divide by activity for example) and compare to other exchange sites. I see in my imagination so many beautiful graphs as a results of such exercise :). Until that what is left is speculation and anecdotal evidences. (I do not have idea how to do it, but since there are stack exchange database dumps somebody with good scripting skills could do it)

Answer 3

Pages which have multiple commenters and active threads of discussion seem to attract more interest and more voting.