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I just got the "notable question" badge for Let Xorg listen on TCP, but only to localhost?. This means the question got 2500 views ... It is my first notable-question badge at all on the SE network, actually. (I only got another "popular question" (1000 views) on Stack Overflow.)

2500 views, but it got no vote at all, and the three answers got only 5 votes (summed).

(This is not meant as a complain that I get too few upvotes, for my questions but a general analysis of the voting vs. viewing behavior. Since I posed this question here, the linked question got some more votes, thanks.)

Is this a good sign, since questions get found in search machines and viewed by the general public (which can't/won't vote), or a bad sign as it reflects almost no voting activity by the Ask Ubuntu users?

I looked up some other questions which got this badge recently, and while they usually don't have zero votes, there are some with 1 or 3 votes, most was 7 votes.

Is there a discrepancy between voting and "popularity"?

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  • 5
    I'd consider it a bad sign, that people just aren't voting. Good questions should be voted up and bad ones voted down. People don't do nearly enough of either.
    – Chan-Ho Suh
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 9:00
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    You know, your profile on questions features a big fat red "0% accept rate" next to it. That may disappoint "answerers" and perhaps even voters -- perhaps to the point of not voting or answering at all. I doubt none of the answers to your five questions were acceptable -- and if they weren't perhaps you should've commented in order to get the answerers to improve them to your satisfaction.
    – ish
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 9:57
  • @izx You are right, I might have neglected the answers to my questions a bit. Just looking, I still can't really with good conscience accept an answer for any of them, though I'll try to test some of the solutions proposed and comment/accept then.
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 17:59
  • Are you trolling for votes? ;) Actually, I suspect that search brings in traffic for the interesting terms, but people either don't care about the particular scenario once they get here, or they aren't stackexchange users (so, voting is foreign).
    – belacqua
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 18:02
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    @belacqua No, I'm actually interested in the question posed here. I'm not a regular Asku Ubuntu user, and don't really care for my reputation here (though I still want to thank the two people who voted today for my linked question).
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 18:27

1 Answer 1

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Even a bad question can attract a lot of search engine traffic.

That's honestly not pointed at your question but we do have a lot of poor questions that attract a surprisingly large amount of traffic, usually because they're full of the right keywords.

While this does show up what people are having problems with it's not a reflection of what people with votes are seeing as they're coming from the questions list, not Google.

People vote for things that interest them.

Now this is aimed at your question: none of the topics in your question are that sexy. And dealing with the networking aspects of X is probably considered specialist and that probably puts people off opening it, let alone voting for it.

People also have different reasons for voting up. Coherent English isn't enough for a lot of people. I personally factor in the the scale of the problem with how useful I think the answer would be to other people.

Either way, it's not your fault. It's a very subjective process and while it would be great if more people voted more, I don't think you should worry too much about making sure all your questions get +10.

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  • So, people did find by question from Google etc., but are not actually interested in the problem? (Yes, I understand that I don't ask the most interesting questions, just the ones I get myself and don't manage to solve myself (or find the answer).)
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Commented Jun 8, 2012 at 19:31
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    I mean the people from google probably aren't users here, so can't vote.
    – Oli Mod
    Commented Jun 10, 2012 at 0:05
  • I think, The second highlighted line is the factor here. "People vote for things that interest them". You definitely questioned a very good, but this does not necessarily means more vote.
    – Anwar
    Commented Jun 16, 2012 at 14:18

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