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This is a question and answer site. Voting is the main feature and distinguishes this site from a forum. Voting is key to stay motivated for answering questions, because of reputation changes.

I think we have many good answers, which are not rated at the moment. In this context, I've discovered by looking at the statistics that there are only 3 voters in this quarter and I wonder why, see Users > Voters > Quarter:

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It's bad practice to leave a comment every time like:

Please upvote or downvote, that's what the site is about.

Does anyone have a reasonable idea to motivate our users to vote?

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    As a side note, it is worth highlighting that quarters are based on calendar quarters, so quarter at this point is the same as month. We do need to work on our voting, but the "quarter" is only the last 20 days.
    – AJ Henderson Mod
    Commented Apr 21, 2015 at 3:48
  • @AJHenderson thanks for the clarification. Really thought this means a quarter year.
    – p2or
    Commented Apr 21, 2015 at 6:42

1 Answer 1

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Stop! If you haven't used up all 30-40 of your votes today, stop reading now and go cast your votes. Find a few dozen questions and answers with less votes than they deserve and go vote for them. When all your votes are all gone, come back and we'll talk. Go now! <grin>

Welcome back. The answer is actually deceptively simple. You have 30-40 votes per day — are you using them? I know that "be the change" sounds a bit trite, but I see a lot of great posts with zero or one vote. So zero votes becomes one; one vote becomes two; everyone reading this post has the ability to SINGLE-HANDEDLY increase the total number of votes on many great posts 50-100%…!

So go do it.

Seriously, when a user finds your site through search, if the post has little to no voting activity, it starts to look like a throw-away feature — "why bother?" — but, if the voting looks like an integral part of the post itself — 2, 10, 50, 100+ votes — suddenly voting looks like the thing to do on this site, and people want to join in on the fray.

Users will generally imitate what they see

The best way to encourage wide-spread voting on a site is to vote yourself! If you haven't run out of votes yet today, don't think in terms of how to get other people to vote; go do it yourself. Before you know it, it will simply become a part of the fabric of the site.

Vote early, vote often

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