Voting for more questions and how to find them

Question

Voting is important on Ask Ubuntu, it is how we know the content we have is good and useful to the community, it has been said before many times, like here by Zanna, we just don't vote for questions, up or down enough

Since traffic is rather high on Ask Ubuntu, most questions don't get enough attention. Reasonable questions do get missed because they require knowledge that relatively few members of the community have. In general, maybe we should be a little bit more generous with votes on questions; as http://meta.askubuntu.com/questions/16204/you-can-vote-do-it suggests, I think we (the whole community) should be voting more - if a question appears to have value, then please consider upvoting it, to help attract some attention to it.

Their would be no point just repeating what has been said, so this question is more focused on, how can we find the questions to vote on? Perhaps if we offer people easy ways to find the questions and highlight the things users get for voting often.

Please give any suggestions you have for people to find questions to vote for or rewards they can earn.

To get started, you can use advanced search to find questions, something like

 is:question score:-1..1 views:0-200 closed:no created:2016-12..2017-01

This will find, all questions with a score of -1 to 1, not closed and posted in the last month and with 200 views or less, here are details on advanced search

I would also like to point out badges. Badges seem to be second class to rep around here but if you are not a very technical user and struggle with rep, badges are a great way to show your contributions to the site, for voting alone, you can get

• Civic Duty: Vote 300 or more times
• Critic: First down vote
• Electorate: Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions
• Suffrage: Use 30 votes in a day
• Supporter: First up vote
• Vox Populi: Use the maximum 40 votes in a day

Answer 1

I usually vote up a question if it meets any of these conditions:

• I can answer it with the information given and I don't see any reason why it should be closed
• Someone else has answered it well or I know someone else will be able to answer it and I don't see any reason why it should be closed
• It seems to be a useful/interesting question and includes enough information to answer it in theory and is on topic (I upvote even if voting to close as dupe)

I usually vote down a question if:

• it is a rant
• I think it is unanswerable with the information given after allowing time for OP to respond to comments
• I don't think it could help anyone else

I find questions to vote on:

• by watching the feed, reading the front page
• doing reviews
• following links posted in comments, in answers, and in the sidebar to linked/related questions
• using the stats page in mod tools
• doing cleanup (I use a data query, my old comments, my review history)

Rewards for voting:

• what goes around comes around ;) or rather, as I think Seth is suggesting here if you like getting votes, then maybe you should be giving votes?

Answer 2

Be careful with upvoting excessively!

(just have a look at my reputation stats)

I used to upvote every day until I ran out of upvotes and a lot of other people did so too. As you end up voting for good people and if they end up voting for you, you get slammed!

Don't complain to me! Go complain here

My advice is to upvote only when it's actually good _{(and very few questions are, but then, I'm an old curmudgeon)}