High Votes on High Rep Users' Posts

Question

I have seen that sometimes, users with a relatively high reputation get a large number of upvotes on simplest of the simplest answers. However, the answer will not have so much value that it shows a lot of research (of course, not to forget, it may not be really necessary for high research, may be because of the type of question itself).

But, very good quality answers, with lot of research get hardly one or two upvotes, just because they are from low rep users. May be the question is of interest only to the OP and the person answering, but if it is of enough research, shouldn't it be upvoted?

Do other high rep users(in the sense with review privileges) upvote on answers of very good quality that they come across, irrespective of the answering person's rep? Or is there any valid reason behind this?

I'm sorry if it sounded a bit harsh, just wanted to know why this happens. You know it takes a lot of time(when you don't have much) and effort to build rep when you are at the lower level with the limited privileges, than when you are above the threshold...

Answer 1

Were these simplest of the simplest answers that got a lot of votes posted for questions that made it to the Hot Network Questions list? It's a common enough event that simple answers to HNQs get massively upvoted because $RANDOM_USER from $RANDOM_OTHER_SE_SITE sees it and upvotes it. Why do some very simple questions get lots of upvotes?

As for high-rep users voting, see https://askubuntu.com/users?tab=Voters and https://askubuntu.com/users?tab=reputation and judge for yourself.

Answer 2

I have posted what I considered well-founded, well-researched answers that gathered not one point. I have posted two line answers that I considered trivial that got many points.

AU giveth and AU taketh away.

Although reputation points are nice validation, I believe that if we answer in order to help rather than to gather points, the points will come to us in time. In some cases, the points may be less than what we feel that we deserve and, in some cases more.

Answer 3

High-rep users are more likely to be longer around and much more likely to answer the easy questions that many users run into and thus get more attention and upvotes.

Well-researched answers are often solutions to intricate problems that get much less attention and thus less upvotes.

Answer 4

It might be also due to errors in the system because for example I get this particular post in my feed as "featured Meta post" and this is the second time this happens in a week. In my opinion this is wrong both times because the question is not very important and also not high traffic. That being said, I do understand why this question is asked and actually I do agree with it. I'm only pointing out that there might be something wrong with the selection system for featured posts which possibly draws additional attention to certain posts. B.T.W.: I use the Android app.

Answer 5

It's human nature to reward the popular. I know that's not the technical or preferred answer but it's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Answer 6

I also wanted to add another reason which is the review queues, accessible after a certain reputation. They offer a very convenient way of filtering the questions into (easier) categories, for example: first post queue.

There might more of such tools that I might not be aware of, since haven't reached there yet ;)