That's something I have noticed at many questions in this site.
A user with a reputation of 20 has posted a great answer but has not received any up votes.
On the other hand, a user with 5k reputation with a less good answer to the same question has indeed received up votes.
So my question is why does that bias happen and what is your opinion on it? Do you up vote answers from low reputation users? If not, why?
What I think (purely IMO) is that high-rep users (the ones with 10k+ rep) had helped many people before. These people know what kind of answers are considered as "good" and will both get upvotes and help the asker. Because those users post great stuff one-in-a-while, most Askubuntu regulars would think that the user will post great stuff all the time, resulting in upvoting stuff from that user no matter what.
New users doesn't know the rules to this site, so they will have to learn how this site works and it's community. Answers that the new user that is considered "Good" might be a spam for the whole community. Some users will go through a "learning stage" that helps them to learn through the stuff in the community and while they are learning, they might post stuff that are great to themselves but not-so-great to the community, which results in lesser upvotes on the question/answer at the beginning. But as they learn new users can know how to write good post and have many upvotes.
You can look at my rep-count graph if you want. At first it takes a while to learn, but after the rules are learnt upvotes seem like a normal thing.
That's wholly in my own opinion, so correct me if I am wrong or you(the reader) disagree.
Low rep people may post great, and useful answers, however I tend to find that people with higher reputation tend to format their posts better and this makes their posts easier to understand.
It is because they know the site better and how to better convey their solution to the asker.
There is a daily reputation limit on this site for a reason; to stop high rep people getting excessive amounts of rep off a single question.
This is a problem on every website that has voting. (HackerNews, Reddit, etc.)
My view is to interpret highly-upvoted material not as "good" per se, but as "representative of the particular site's hive mind".
Well Nick, here's a case of the opposite happening.
Cant see databases of mysql from command prompt in ubuntu 12.04
The question was asked, and I provided an answer. Then a newbie user comes along 5 minutes later, posting basically the same information that was in my answer, and his gets accepted.
Maybe I'm a little biased in this case, and "no" I don't have rep that equals a few thousand points, but I guess sometimes it just goes the other way too.
@ObsessiveFOSSto notify me.