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There are two situations that I've noticed.

First: There are many upvotes on the answer and no upvotes on the question, or more upvotes on answer compared to question. If the answer is useful then why user don't find the question is useful too as s/he was also researching the question to find the answer and

Second: The question is marked as a duplicate of other but that duplicate question sometimes received more upvotes than the main one.

Third: Question has more stars(favorites) than upvote and around 20k view in just a few months.

For the first situation and for the second one.

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  • I think this question is too broad as you ask about two different situations with different factors involved. For the first part, see for example Should a question not have at least as many upvotes as answers? (I upvoted that question btw)
    – Zanna Mod
    Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 6:37
  • To make this more in-topic please provide some examples.
    – user364819
    Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 7:19
  • @ParanoidPanda I think better to include questions that i've asked than find others. For the first situation and for second one
    – d a i s y
    Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 7:56
  • @daisy: Ok, then probably best to edit your question with them so all can clearly see without having to look at the comments.
    – user364819
    Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 7:59

2 Answers 2

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Because reasons. There's really no explanation for how voting happens. In fact, explaining it is impossible because it's an anomalous field and users don't always vote in a sane way. That said, I can try to answer each scenario independently.

For situation one, some of the votes can just be attributed to people really liking an answer. It's not necessarily that someone is researching that topic -- they might just have stumbled across that answer and thought it was good. You see this situation a lot with answers that hit the front page. Similarly, users just don't vote or vote weird. Alternatively, people may have downvoted the question for being "useless" or something that could have been easily researched.

For situation two, the duplicate targets tend to go to the question with better answers. If question A has 15 upvotes and three very good answers, question B with 20 upvotes will be duplicated to question A, because it's more likely that users landing on question B will get help from question A.

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  • I think one more point I see while editing is 'Question Title'. I remember well that user did not receive enough attention to the question but after editing the question title, not just got attention but resolved the issue.
    – d a i s y
    Commented Jun 19, 2017 at 8:02
  • I think people just search for a answer they need to a question they have - they click through duplicates, scroll down until they find something they like and vote on that answer - occasionally that question but rarely a duplicate it was sourced from unless that contained a useful answer.
    – Wilf
    Commented Jun 21, 2017 at 9:31
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I believe it comes down to two things:

First, the user interface for the site presents voting for answers like a competition: here are some choices, pick one or two of them that you like and downvote those you don't, all on a single page.

Questions however are looked at and voted on alone, not in the context of other questions. Many people won't even think about the question as needing to be voted on. I believe this is why the "You haven't voted on any questions in a while" dialog was created.

Secondly, many people don't consider voting for questions important, or in some cases don't even realize that voting for questions is an option.

Humans tend to value solutions more than problems. If you have a problem, and you find the solution to the problem, you will tend to want to reward the provider of the solution, not another person who has the same problem, even though the answer wouldn't be there if the question hadn't been asked.

We place more value on results than the process by which those results were achieved.

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