I think that upvoting more questions will produce better questions

Question

Introduction

It makes a lot of sense to me that if people are more generous with their upvotes—even with questions that are just "okay" and fall slightly short of the standard—then the people asking questions will be motivated to form better ones the next time.

As someone who uses multiple websites here, I can tell you, undoubtedly, that the sites which reward my questions with more upvotes are the ones where I ask the highest quality questions. The feedback you get with upvotes really does inspire you to write thoughtful questions.

But the problem here is that, even a thoughtful, well-researched question can receive zero to one upvotes, giving one little incentive to ask thoughtful, well-researched questions.

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Examples

Examples are always useful, so I'll try to come up with some examples. The questions below show basic research but haven't received many upvotes (at least, at the time of writing this).

1. Is it undesirable to have two consecutive words end in "s"? (1 upvote)
2. Is "leave out to dry" an accepted variation of "hang out to dry"? (1 upvote)
3. When do you use "relate to" versus "relate with"? (0 upvotes)

Unfortunately, the problem runs even deeper. Not only are good questions only getting 1 upvote, but single-word-request and idiom-request questions are getting plenty of upvotes. This likely happens for the wrong reasons, i.e., the multiplicity of answers, each answerer upvoting the question merely to get an upvote themselves.

1. Idiom for magic object (or idea) that fixes everything (24 upvotes)
2. Opposite of "witty" (8 upvotes)
3. What are some ways to say, "a return to what things were"? (6 upvotes)

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Conclusion / Food for thought

I think the influx of bad questions has created a culture of non-voting, which, ironically, has prevented people from asking good questions, since there is less of an incentive.

Would you agree that upvoting more questions that are "good" or "good enough" will eventually produce better questions? That it will motivate askers to form a better question the next time?

Answer 1

When I checked your six examples a couple of hours ago, they had the following vital statistics:

Group 1

1. Posted 10/24/2017, 45 views, 2 upvotes/1 downvote, 0 answers

2. Posted 3/27/2017, 592 views, 1 upvote/0 downvote, 2 answers (3 up/0 down: 2/0 & 1/0)

3. Posted 12/30/2016, 6,473 views, 0 upvote/0 downvote, 0 answers

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Group 2

1. Posted 7/24/2013, 6,787 views, 25 upvotes/1 downvote, 12 nondeleted answers (142 up/3 down: 56/1, 20/0, 19/0, 12/0, 11/0, 10/0, 8/2, 6/0, 4/0, 3/0, 2/0 & 2/0)

2. Posted 5/24/2014, 2,726 views, 8 upvotes/0 downvote, 9 nondeleted answers (15 up/2 down: 2/1, 7/0, 4/0, 1/0, 1/0, 0/0, 0/0, 0/0 & 0/1)

3. Posted 4/16/2017, 154 views, 7 upvotes/0 downvote, 6 nondeleted answers (12 up/1 down: 5/1, 2/0, 2/0, 2/0, 1/0 & 0/0)

The two closest matches in terms of page views are #3 from group 1 and #1 from group 2. The level of total viewer interest in these two questions appears to be quite close: #3 in group 1 (posted 10 months ago) is only 314 page views behind #1 in group 2 (posted more than four years ago).

But the numbers for question upvoting, question answering, and answer upvoting are strikingly different. The group 1, #3 question has received 0 upvotes and has drawn 0 answers, while the group 2, #1 question has received a net 24 upvotes and has drawn 12 nondeleted answers that have received a total of 142 upvotes and 3 downvotes.

How can we explain this tremendous difference in voting and answering with regard to two questions that have received, respectively, 6,473 and 6,787 page views?

It can't be that site visitors aren't interested in the group 1, #3 question. At the rate its page views are accumulating, it will surpass the total page views for group 2, #1 by the end of the year. And yet no one has attempted to answer group 1, #3 and no one has upvoted or downvoted it.

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A deep dive into group 1, #3

One theory might be that people who have looked at group 1, #3 have been irrationally unwilling to upvote it even though it is a "good" or "good enough" question. Another possibility is that it is a very difficult question to resolve, which discourages people from answering it or upvoting it. A third possibility is that it is flawed in some way that makes it unappealing to people who might otherwise be able to put together a reasonable answer to it.

I suspect that the third theory—or perhaps an amalgam of the third theory and the second theory—is the likeliest to be true. The header asks when one should use "relate to" and when one should use "relate with." The body of the question proposes a hypothesis that "relate with" applies to people and "relate to" applies to things, and then asks for a rule about using one phrase or the other.

According to the hypothesis in the question, people tend to say things like "how do you relate to President Trump's immigration policies?" but "how do you relate with President Trump?" Some people may divide their usage of "relate to" and "relate with" in that way, but in my experience most people do not. Further, I suspect that there is no rule one way or the other governing the use of "relate to" and "relate with."

Here is an Ngram of the phrase "relate to him" (blue line) versus "relate with him" (red line) versus "relate to it" (green line) versus "relate with it" (yellow line) for the period 1900–2008:

As you can see, the incidences of "relate with him" and "relate with it" very nearly flat-line, while the incidences of "relate to him" and "relate to it" are quite healthy—and track each other fairly closely until about 1980.

Also, if you look at the linked matches beneath the chart in the Ngram graph version of the chart, you'll find lots of examples in recent years of sentences like "None of the Zambians had any reason to relate to him" (1984) and relatively few sentences like "The more he could get people to relate with him, the more these people would lean in his direction without even knowing it" (1998). You'll even find some sentences like "They actually relate with it through the set of elements that they have placed between it and themselves" (1998). Clearly if there is a rule about using "relate to" with objects and "relate with" with people, a lot of writers aren't following it.

But there is another complication: "relate to him" and "relate to it" don't just mean "feel a connection to [someone or something]"; they can also mean "tell [someone or something] a story or narrative." Consequently, the Ngram chart is unreliable as a gauge of "relate to" versus "relate with" in the narrow sense of "feel a connection to [someone or something]."

So we're left with anecdotal evidence that writers don't widely follow a rule that "relate to" goes with things and "relate with" goes with people, suggesting that for practical purposes there may not be any such rule, plus an Ngram chart that, though impressive looking, is essentially useless owing to a confounding variable. To my mind, that's a poor basis for a convincing answer—especially if the preliminary data puts the answerer in the position of trying to prove a negative in answer to the posted question. I wouldn't be inclined to submit an answer to group 1, #3 on that basis, anyway.

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A shallow dip into group 2, #1

Group 2, #3 asks for an idiom that describes "a magic object or idea that fixes everything." It's a simple question with many possible answers. The obvious single-word answer is panacea, which happens to be the highest-voted (and accepted) answer. But there are lots of other possibilities.

People love answering questions like this one, and they love to check the answers that others have suggested, and they tend to upvote ones that either match what they would have suggested or strike them as good ideas they hadn't thought of. Back in 2013, I often added my two cents to questions like that one, which is why one of the answers is mine (I also upvoted the question). But there is no mistaking the answers or the question for anything profound or carefully researched. The whole page is essentially fluff.

But people like fluff—and they especially like fluff involving single-word and phrase requests. They just do. The idea that questions like group 1, #1, #2, and #3 could become as popular as questions like group 2, #1, #2, and #3 if only people would upvote them more freely is based (in my opinion) on a misunderstanding of the huge difference in voting power and voting behavior between "word and phrase request" voters and "grammar, usage, and etymology" voters. The two groups do overlap to some extent, but in general they aren't engaged in the same activity, and they are looking for very different sorts of entertainment at this site.

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Parting advice

I think that people at English Language & Usage upvote questions that they find interesting and that meet or exceed their criteria for baseline acceptability as EL&U questions. I don't think that people would post better questions if those questions received a stronger positive response in the form of upvotes. It certainly doesn't seem to be happening with SWRs/PRs/IRs—and many of them get lots of upvotes.

If you have a question that you think is interesting, and if you can meet the threshold criteria to avoid having it closed, I don't see why you wouldn't post it. A question that is "good enough" rarely becomes a target of heavy downvoting—and if no one upvotes it, so what? It's there because you care about it—and maybe an answerer will care about it, too, and try to offer a useful answer to it.

That, I think, is the most that any question asker can reasonably hope for from this website.

Answer 2

I might support your premise if you said that more generous upvotes on truly good questions could eventually lead to an overall improvement in question quality.

However, I really dislike the notion that I should more generously upvote "okay" questions, as though that will somehow inspire people to write better questions in the long run. I would guess such a change would have the opposite effect: Why would an OP bother to put in extra effort to write a very good question when people are already upvoting their "okay" questions?

That sounds like a strategy that will get the site further mired in the muds of mediocrity, as opposed to one that will lead to substantial improvement across the site over time.

Answer 3

May I suggest that what really inhibits someone asking a question on any Stack Exchange sites is not downvotes or lack of upvotes on the question but the very real prospect of your question getting closed for some reason or the other before anybody can write a good answer.

Receiving upvotes on a question is certainly good feedback but it is not critical to getting the question answered. As long as I get a satisfactory answer to my question that addresses my main concerns and provides authoritative explanations or solutions, I am unlikely to be bothered by downvotes or lack of upvotes. I won't even mind my question getting closed after someone has written at least one very good answer.

Please note that the numerous upvotes on SWR questions do not often indicate quality of research and usually simply reflect the very high popularity of single word requests. In any case, most users on English.SE earn a big majority of their reputation not from upvotes on questions they asked, but from upvotes on good answers they have written.

To conclude, the real worry on any Stack Exchange site is our questions getting closed too early, and the real encouragement for asking more questions is getting good answers to our previous questions.

Answer 4

One of my very eminent professors at MIT (in quantum mechanics) said that "there are no bad questions". Of course, that was about quantum mechanics, and in the late 1950s, when it was still often said of quantum mechanics that "nobody understands it". Expanded to any question about anything, his statement is, of course, not true.

But it is true enough to be relevant to this Meta Question.

By this I mean that some mediocre questions on ELU and other SE sites give rise to surprising and deep answers. It is always hard to find an example when one needs one, so I offer one of my questions on Motor Vehicle Repair and Maintenance on repair of a tiny ding as an example of a mediocre question, with a great answer.

In my opinion, when a question leads to a exceptional answer, it deserves at least an upvote from the person who answered it (as my ding question received.) I find a situation where a question with few or no upvotes gives rise to highly upvoted, excellent, answers....perverse. The question is the mother of the answer; the question sparked something in the answerer. That should be acknowledged, for sure by the answerer, and by at least a few upvoters of the answer.

Please note that I am not talking about poor questions that elicit perfunctory answers, or answers in comments.