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Not always - see e.g. this (shameless self-plug): http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 . I don't think there is a

Not always - see e.g. this (shameless self-plug): http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 . I don't think there is a solution - popular stuff will be popular. Is a solution needed, though? The point is to get answers - votes from answers are the incentive, but in the end, it's just a bunch of numbers. As long as the results are obvious - e.g. a question with answers having 75%, 15%, 10% and 5% of votes - it's not terribly interesting whether that means 15, 3, 2 and 1 vote, or 750, 150, 100 and 50. Also, being able to vote posts <0 is good - bogus answers will be apparent.

aidenn0 15y ago
I think that one gets so many upvotes because people who know how hard it is to send a lot of e-mail love to point that answer to people who don't (e.g. bosses, clients) making it very useful to a lot of people.
- Piskvorrr 15y ago
  Exactly! My point wasn't to get a ridiculous number of votes on it. My point in writing this was to be useful - even for me - as a "go-to" answer for the question that gets asked all the time (I did start out short-ish, and expanded it over time). It's an outlier for sure; I think 99.9% of all posts never get beyond 50 votes, and most don't get over 10 - mind you, most of my posts have fewer than 2 votes. With popular topics, you get more votes simply because there are more people looking at your question; does that make this one so great because it has 700+ votes? I'd say it says that sending e-mails is a popular topic, first and foremost - and apparently the question is also somewhat useful. And then the snowball effect kicks in, and the post gets more popular because it's so popular. Anyway, a +5 in a niche (such as this answer which someone gave to me on a rather narrow problem: http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 ), to me, carries more weight than +500 in a topic with which everyone is somewhat familiar.

aidenn0 15y ago

I think that one gets so many upvotes because people who know how hard it is to send a lot of e-mail love to point that answer to people who don't (e.g. bosses, clients) making it very useful to a lot of people.

Piskvorrr 15y ago
Exactly! My point wasn't to get a ridiculous number of votes on it. My point in writing this was to be useful - even for me - as a "go-to" answer for the question that gets asked all the time (I did start out short-ish, and expanded it over time). It's an outlier for sure; I think 99.9% of all posts never get beyond 50 votes, and most don't get over 10 - mind you, most of my posts have fewer than 2 votes. With popular topics, you get more votes simply because there are more people looking at your question; does that make this one so great because it has 700+ votes? I'd say it says that sending e-mails is a popular topic, first and foremost - and apparently the question is also somewhat useful. And then the snowball effect kicks in, and the post gets more popular because it's so popular. Anyway, a +5 in a niche (such as this answer which someone gave to me on a rather narrow problem: http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 http://stackoverflow.com/a/413836/19746 ), to me, carries more weight than +500 in a topic with which everyone is somewhat familiar.