Why does a design comparison question between win8 and win7 score 25 votes but get -1 votes with winxp and win7?

Question

There is this interesting question Why are start-up times faster on Windows 8? and currently it has 25 votes. It focuses on win7 to win8 differences from performance point of view.

I thought it would be interesting to point out the difference between XP and 7, too, as that was a bigger architecture change and probably bigger performance gain.

I asked Why are start-up times faster on Windows 7 than on XP? and it currently has -1 votes. While I'm not a vote count freak, I don't really see what am I doing wrong. I've tried to address the same problem but the 'popularity' of my question, compared to the other one, is a bit outstanding, even if they were meant to be very similar.

My best guess is that I'm somehow making unreasonable points (?) or using an irritating writing style here, but I can't see what do I lack or commit and how to phrase a better question.

I'm assuming that my attempt to see behind the scenes design differences between winxp and win7 from performance point of view is valid, provided that the win8 question is valid and worth 25 votes here.

What is wrong with my question and what can I do to make it a better question?

Answer 1

You've done nothing wrong. At least not in comparison to the other question. You were probably just there at the wrong time.

First of all, you'll never know why someone voted unless you asked them directly, but here are some arguments:

• The Windows 8 question was… well, about Windows 8. It was brand new at that time, so everybody was interested in why it was allegedly faster than its predecessor. It's not a great question because the answer could have been found quite easily—and the answer merely consisting of a large blockquote shows that as well—, but it had this "Hey, I want to know this too!" effect at the right time. There's always a thin line between these kinds of questions in terms of how popular they get.

• For the Windows 8 question, nobody pointed out the lack of research effort by the OP. From my experience: When you leave down votes and accompany them not only with a comment explaining what's wrong with the post (like you should), but also explicitly write, "-1, …", others are much more likely to jump on the bandwagon and downvote the post as well, because you just publicly played the first one to throw the stone. Not that this is the case here, but it shows a social effect.

Which brings us to the final point:

• Meta. If the comments below the discussion end up in a debate about how the answer could have been found by consulting Google, then you can be sure one or the other person down votes your post for the lack of research effort. Well, because it's there and someone noticed it. People draw away the discussion from the actual post. Which is why I intervened and simply asked the person who pointed you to the blog article to post a proper answer.

All in all I wouldn't worry all too much about it. I might clean up the comment thread in a few days from now.

For the future, I would suggest spending the extra five minutes before asking a question thoroughly looking if it was already answered somewhere. Now, we can't know if you did, but if you write about your research and what it already showed you, this will give you a much better response (both in terms of an actual answer as well as the votes you'll receive). And in many cases you might not even have to ask a question because you found the answer while searching for it, so as not to have someone claim you didn't properly research.