Old questions - system discourages answering them?

Question

I've been a member on other SE sites for a while now, but only recently joined SU. I found a few things a bit different here, and there are a couple of things I think could use some discussion.

1. Answering old questions.

Over about a 3 day period, I searched through SU questions in my speciality topic area (proxy servers). I spent quite a lot of time and answered about 30 questions, many of which had no other answer. Compared to other sites, I found the response to the answers (mostly no response at all) to be quite discouraging, and in fact learned that if you want to gain rep on here, you need to jump on new questions quickly, and ignore old ones.

This isn't going to get all those old questions answered. Many of the "unanswered" questions I saw actually had a perfectly good answer. Sometimes the asker just wanted reality to be different so resisted accepting the correct answer, or worse argued with it.

I know that "late answers" are reviewed, and so I think it would be interesting if reviewers were encouraged to give some kind of reaction to the answer, such as an upvote or downvote if they feel the answer deserves it.

In many cases these questions come up on google searches, and so an answer even years later can still be useful to people.

2. Lack of reward from the community compared to other SE sites

Compared to the other SE sites, it seems that people are much less likely to upvote an answer they see and find useful. I've had comments from OP like a variant of "thanks for that!", yet no upvote. I don't want to ask these people to upvote directly. I see it in a lot of other posts also, so often I will go and upvote something that I think deserves it, just out of a sense of redressing the injustice that the responder's effort was not appropriately rewarded.

Do people need to be reminded to reward other people's efforts when they are helped? Do they need to be reminded that they can upvote more than 1 answer if the answer is helpful?

Answer 1

I skimmed through your answering history, and I noticed that many of your answers that still have zero votes are in response to questions that are either already answered or posted by very-low-rep users.

Sometimes owners of already-solved questions will only upvote new answers that significantly help them in their situations. If the situation has long been dealt with, they might not even be able to test your answer, so it's understandable that they didn't vote.

Users with only 1 reputation point, in my experience, sometimes forget about this site entirely, or only check back after several weeks have gone by. It's not unusual to get no response from such users. If you do get a "thanks!" comment from them and your answer is the first one posted, it's perfectly fine in my opinion to say something like this:

Glad I could help! If my answer completely solved the problem, you can click the check mark next to it so future readers know it's useful.

If they accept your answer, delete your comment.

If you're consistently getting no upvotes, make sure you're actually answering the question. Saying "do X to accomplish Y, or maybe try Z" can be useful to an advanced user who knows how to do X and Z, but for many users, step-by-step instructions are needed. You've recommended your company's software a couple times (and that's fine - you do a good job of disclosing that fact), which might make some people uneasy. You can counteract that by being a lot more detailed in how to use the software to accomplish the task. Also, in all cases, try including pictures. People like pictures.

Note that all new answers push the question to the site's home page, no matter how old the question is. A really awesome answer will almost certainly get some votes.

Answer 2

What is written in BenN's answer is completely true, just an additional aspect:

Compared to the other SE sites, it seems that people are much less likely to upvote an answer they see and find useful.

Generally Superuser is the site which attracts people having an IT problem but no idea on computers (or at least this is the site where questions from these people can survive), that can be the reason why we have a lot of abandoned question, no upvotes on answers and so on.

When I'm to answer a question with only a small chance that it's abandoned I ask for clarification on a comment and if don't get answer in a few days then vote to close it as unclear.

I know that "late answers" are reviewed, and so I think it would be interesting if reviewers were encouraged to give some kind of reaction to the answer, such as an upvote or downvote if they feel the answer deserves it.

I know there are also positive examples, but also there are a lot of negative ones. Reviewing posts from new users (with 700+ reps currently I don't think yours are reviewed) I upvote only good ones ANSWERING GOOD QUESTIONS, putting a lot of efforts answering poor questions I think is just vaste of time add have only a small chance to be useful to anybody ever.