I think this is a usability/motivation issue.

You can't vote up questions on the 'index' pages like you can on reddit ^[1]/ Digg ^[2]/so on, so people aren't going to go 'that looks cool' and vote it up (or vice versa) before reading it.

IMHO this is a good thing, but...

As I see it, the 'workflow' of reading a question/answer goes like this:

• User opens page

• User reads question

  • Unless the question is abnormally good or bad, or otherwise provocative, this isn't likely to elicit any emotional response. It's just a question, carry on.

• User scrolls down and begins reading answers

  • As there are many answers, and good answers are rewarded by being 'accepted' and also with increased reputation, this puts the user in the mindset of 'make the answers better'

  • The emotional response behind having your answer accepted or upvoted is "I know stuff, I'm smart, I feel good." Likewise, conferring that reward on someone else is quite a powerful thing too. This provides a very strong motivation to rank and provide answers.

• Because of this motivation, people will put a lot of effort into writing answers (like me with this diatribe) and ranking them.

This works very well for providing and filtering good answers, but there's no such motivation behind voting for questions. For most questions, the strongest response they are likely to elicit is "I have that problem too", which while it's strong, is only going to apply to a small portion of the viewers/answerers.

While I think this is why questions aren't being voted on as much, I don't think you need to go all out to provide more motivation for it, as this would distract from the main goal of writing/ranking the answers. A simple 'nudge' to remind people to vote on questions I think will do the job without any/many adverse effects.

My suggestion for this is simply to make the voting buttons on the question proportionately larger (or make the ones by answers smaller), and possibly change the color or something.

This will draw the reader's attention to them, and send the message 'hey, while you're here, vote on the question before carrying on reading the answers'

After tinkering way too much, I've come to the opinion that there's no great reason for down-voting a question.

Remember the old saying "There are no stupid questions" - well, I think that applies here.

• If the question is too vague, leave a response to that effect (or vote up a comment that states that already).
• If the question contains a typographic or syntactic problem, edit the question for clarity.
• If the question is outright spam, or abusive, flag it as such.

But down-voting a question? What's the point? If the question is naive you can simply answer it.

Down-voting lacks any good use cases (as described above) but worse than that, it is open to abuse:

• If you don't like the person who asked it, you might down-vote it.
• If you don't like the topic, you might down-vote it.
• If you don't like the religious or political beliefs of the question, you might down-vote it.

Down-voting now attracts a penalty to the down-voter's rep, that's an interesting development, but I think the simpler and more correct variation would be stop the ability to down-vote a question.

I actually think this is not a problem, it is simply nature showing us how the system should be design.

In my opinion, there is no reason to rate questions, and we should not try to "fix" it but understand why it is happening. and a possible outcome (the correct one in my opinion) is to do without the voting on questions.

Voting on answers is great, but I see no reason for the existence of question voting.

Even worse, while the voting is useless (yet harmless), the absolute "evil" baked into the system is the fact that you get reputation when your question gets voted! That is an "evil" incentive to post questions for other reasons beside the ONLY valid reason: you want to get an answer to your question.

Giving people incentive to post questions just so they can get reputation is a just as lame as Microsoft giving you "points" for searching using their search.. Motivation for searching should be getting good results. Motivation for posting Stack Overflow question is to get an answer, period.

Remember the old saying "There are no stupid questions" -- well I think that applies here.

I disagree. There clearly can be, and have been, questions that are pointless or off-topic. If Stack Overflow is to stay useful as an information source and not turn into just another Digg or redit programming section, then there is a need for community policing. I think the system right now is pretty decent. By docking a small amount of reputation for every negative vote cast, it encourages people to be more careful with downmods.

I believe that votes to the answers should contribute to the questions rank as outlined here:

http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/15865

I agree that answer votes should count towards question score somehow. In that thread, I advocated automatically upmodding a question when you upmod an answer.

I believe that this would have the benefits that come from giving a bonus to the question based on the answer score while still giving freedom to vote the question down if necessary.

Already, I've run into situations where I have downvoted questions I felt were bad even though I upvoted the answers. I believe that any system where the answers contribute to vote score must take this sort of situation into account, and I feel that the method I proposed would be the simplest way to do it both for the users and for the site developers.

I think the "Votes" filter tab on the main page should take into account the up mods for answers in calculating a question's total score.

I would like to be voting more questions up, but I still don't have 50 reputation.

Also, when you start using the system, you can't vote at all. So a lot of questions and answers might be lacking in votes.

It says I must have 50 reputation in order to begin voting. I'd like to be voting up questions and answers now.

I think it's more natural to vote for answers rather than questions. To me, the default reason to vote for a question would be to encourage others to answer it. If it's already answered, so the thinking goes, why not just vote up the answer rather than the question?

I don't think that line of thought is the best thing for the site in the long run, but it may be a behavioral issue right now, especially as young as the site is.

What about automating it (I'm a programmer ;))?
If you answer it, the question is voted up automatically. If you don't think it's worth it, you can vote it down afterwards.
Will increase reputation points inflation, but there is always a drawback.

I think the reason why there is no immediate ability to upvote is to prevent people making lots of sockpuppets ^[1] and upvoting themselves - enough of that and they would be able to start editing pages and pose a potential problem if there isn't a way of stopping this sort of gaming of the system.

The current situation may not be the best solution, but I do think it is better than leaving the site open to that sort of abuse.

I agree that one big reason is the +25 reputation restriction to upvote.
I understand that since this is a beta, people can come up with a handful of new questions and earn those points quickly, but when SO gets more filled with questions, it will become more common that new people come here, search and find the answer they are looking for. And I think finding what you are looking for is totally worth the upvote. Besides, allowing it early would encourage the good practice of searching instead of creating repeated (or re-worded) questions. I've seen may good questions so far that I would like to upvote but I don't want to just throw a random question just to earn the reputation needed to do that.

There is a difference between questions and answers (that sentence alone should warrant a "No s**t, Sherlock!" Badge...).

Often, I see questions that are of no personal interest (and therefore not useful) to me, so I see no reason to vote it up. But the answer to those questions maybe useful for me, by giving some additional information that I can use. Or I just think "Whoa, that is some quality content for the site".

On the other hand, when the question is useful to me (because I asked myself the same thing) or if I believe that a question is good and very useful, I +1 it, which does happen a lot more seldom than upping answers.

At the end of the day, the site is about personal benefit: Whenever an article helps me to gain something that helps me in my work, it gets +1.

We are only seeing the positive votes, if we could see both +/- votes it might make more sense.

I don't understand the motivation behind down-voting a question. Down-voting an answer I get, but unless the question is offensive or spam or something (and there are different ways to deal with those), I'm not sure why you'd need to down-vote a question.

I also don't quite get why you need a +15 reputation to up-vote anything.

Well, I know why I haven't voted on any questions. It's because I can't - apparently you need a reputation of 15 just to vote something else up?

While I can understand restricting the ability to vote down, a restriction on the ability to vote up seems a little to much - but this is my first day, so maybe I'm just not used to the new system yet.

Why aren’t people rating questions? You need 15 reputation to vote. (Hopefully this brings me a little closer to being able to do so)

Food for thought: While the number of votes for questions is lower, the ration of up/down is relatively close since the end of the Happy, Happy! Joy, Joy! times of Beta.

Average Score of Questions vs. Answers by Month (from Aug 2009 dump)

I upmod things that are interesting to me, that I feel I might need in a future project, that I think would be a valuable FAQ or that I think need a knowledgeable answer to a well asked question.

I can't comment on others motivation.

Why people don't vote on questions? Because most questions don't trigger the "oh, that's helpful" response that comes with a good answer. Mostly I guess because questions themselves don't contain much information.

I tend to up-vote only questions that are * well written or * where someone has taken the care to aggregate answers into the question or * which I would have had to type up, if they weren't already there.

I'm going to put a vote in agreement with everyone else in that the reputation required to up-vote a question might be hurting the system a bit. Personally, I tend to also up-vote questions that I think are interesting or that I would like to know the answer to as well, but that is generally when there aren't many answers to the question yet. Once there are more answers to the question I tend to up-vote the answers instead.

One thing that I think might be useful in causing more questions to be up-voted is what others have suggested in lowering the bar for when you can start up-voting questions; however, I would go so far as to say as soon as you have 10 points (i.e. one good question or answer worth of up-votes) you should be able to up-vote questions. Then the bar for up-voting the answers could be moved up a bit to say 100 points or so.

However, one thing that might be skewing things a bit is the member base. I'm not sure of the exact numbers of users; however, I have started to notice some common names in answers and it might be that the lack of a broad user base is hurting this part of the beta. I know that I personally tend to ignore questions that I know there is no way of me knowing the answer to so I wouldn't be surprised if other users might be doing the same thing. If you look at the questions with the most up-votes, they tend to either be related to the site itself (i.e. tagged with stackoverflow) or tend to be broad base fundamental topics that everyone would likely be familiar with (i.e. tagged language-agnostic).

This is definitely something that needs to be monitored, but I am quite curious to see if it starts to resolve itself a bit as the user base increases.

1. I seems quite likely to me that both questions and answers will follow distribution that approximates a power law ^[1]. I have no justification for this option, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

2. It's likely that the set of programming questions that are seem as most relevant to everyone is a fairly small subset of all the questions that get asked, unless the community is very homogeneous.

3. Each question is likely to have an answer that is viewed as being the best - if I view question which already has a good answer, I'm more likely to upmod the answer that add my own answer to the question.

Many questions address a very specific problem and the answers are not helpful to the casual reader. While we can still recognize the correct/helpful answers to those questions, we do not judge the question to be 'good' or 'bad'. The question just 'is'.

I'm not sure what would constitue a good question. My answer would be: a question that evokes discussion, because it draws attention to something that software engineers should investigate. However, that is just the kind of question for which this website is not intended.

I try my best to vote for anything I think is helpful. I think that seeing both up and downs (as kevin d suggested) is a good idea but I would suggest making it so that when you someone up-votes something you up-voted, you get 1 point.

There are no good questions, only good answers.

Maybe the quality of a question comes from the sum how many people answered it and how many people rated the answers?

I would only vote for question that makes me think: Gee, I'd like to know that too. However, I yet to run into such question. I guess it's the same for most other people. You usually reply to question others don't know, but you do.

Also, it says 'this was helpful' when you hover over a question, which does not make much sense. Answers can be helpful. Maybe something like 'this is interesting' or 'this is a good question' would be much better.

I tend to upvote questions when the answers are generalizable, or the problem is a question whose answer has implications for a lot of other problems. I do this so that when I look at tag, say python, then the questions I see will be ones that are almost guaranteed to have relevance to *me, for many values of me.

What is question upvoting really supposed to be for?

This is being overthought.

I call Benford's Law ^[1] on the voting distribution.

I would have up voted several things in the past 20 minutes if there wasn't a silly reputation restriction on up votes. I can understand down vote limits, and an can understand a probation period, but it shouldn't kick in automatically it should be applied when your reputation drops, not when you're first starting off.

Now the initial impression is "Why did I just register? I can't do anything." It will also lead to far more duplicate answers because I can't easily say "I agree with this existing answer." I either have to post my own 90% similar answer, or say "@johndoe I agree" which doesn't elevate the answer in the rankings, requires the reader to parse and scroll back to see what johndoe said, and gives johndoe no benefit from their good answer.

This post is a perfect example of this, lots of other people have said "Vote Up shouldn't be restricted" but I have no way to reinforce their point without you reading all this garbage I just wrote...

The answer ratings have a graphical interpretation. The little up-arrow pushes the answer up the score-scale, and thus up the page; and the down arrow pushes it down the score-scale, and thus down the page. That a question has a score of 20 vs 200 vs 2000 doesn't tell me anything, as there is no implied comparison with other questions. I have to think about the meaning of the question voting widget every time I see it, as it does not intuitively mean anything.

I would suggest that the question's rating (for whatever purposes that rating has) be inferred from the answer ratings. Maybe the question score could be the sum total of all answer votes.

Inferring from the number of answers is less attractive, as some answer sequences are actually conversation threads, and do not reflect on the quality of the question.

Couldn't it automatically infer the value of a question by other metrics like # of answers and # of up votes on answers, # of views, etc.

Answers that are voted up are usually deep answers, but they typically require a deep question. Don't they? Let's turn to the DB to find out.

From a design standpoint I reckon you should have the question rating on the browsing pages. It I don't like a question I'm not going to bother with opening it and then rating it. I'd rather have a "bury/promote" function in the question listings themselves.

One of the fundamental issues that doesn't seem to have been addressed seems to me to be pretty fundamental: There seem to be no incentive for upvoting questions, so why would I bother?

In practice, I do go out of my way to try and upvote questions, but I seem to be in the minority.

At first, I did get some value from upvoting because I could then find interesting questions again through my personal page (that's how I found myself behaving: "upvote = mark this question so I can find it again later"). Now that "favourites" have been enabled, I no longer even get this benefit.

So basically, the only motivation I now see for upvoting is some nebulous "do unto others" kind of philosophy.

That may suit me, but by embarking with the whole reputation system, stackoverflow has marked itself as a different beast. Live by the rep, die by the rep.

That's not a bad thing, just the way things are.

SO is a rep-based economy. Want people to upvote questions? Easy: attach some incentive to it.

I know this is a very old thread which was started when SO was still in beta. However, after reading through all of the 51 answers posted here by the time I'm writing this, I had the feeling, that my answer wasn't here yet. Reading the answers brought me to the conclusion that there is a great consent on why to vote for an answer (i.e. promotion of good answers as well as giving credit to the users who provided them). However, there's quite an amount of different opinions on why to vote for questions or whether to vote for them at all.

Before adding my own two cents, I'd like to sum up what I've found to be the essence of most answers (apart from nuances):

People don't vote for questions, because they...

1. ...find it more natural to vote for answers than for questions.
2. ...see no benefit in voting on questions. Several answers to the same question are comparable amongst each other and voting for answers brings the good ones to the top. However, voting for questions is considered comparing apples and oranges - it just makes no sense.
3. ...believe attributing reputation to someone for not knowing something is inherently wrong or that at least the amount of reputation gained through an upvoted question should be substantially smaller than that gained through an upvoted answer.

Regarding 1., there didn't seem to be much reasoning, so I'm not inclined to reason myself in order to refute these opinions.

Regarding 2.: If people vote questions up that they believe are worth asking and that are well written ( SSCCE ^[1], good english, good formatting), then a questions score would be a measure of quality. This would help to bring high quality questions to the top of the search results and hide less well crafted questions. If that's not a benefit, then what?

Regarding 3., I do understand and to some extent even share this opinion. But I find it important to distinguish reputation and vote count as two completely different concepts that aim to achieve different things.

As already stated, vote count (whether on questions or on answers) is supposed to reflect quality. Reputation on the other hand, is a measure for the merit of an individual. For the individuals the reputation has value, because it is something they can brag about or that they may even be able to use when applying for a new job. Because it has value, it is a good instrument to stimulate participation.

However, the possibility of gaining reputation from asking questions somehow lowers the value of that reputation. Where's the merit in asking a question? Imagine you're looking at an answer posted by a 60k rep user and you think "Whoa", but then you look at his profile and you see that 90% of his rep came from questions. For me that makes a difference. Conversely I'm not too impressed by people who pretend to know everything by never asking any questions. It just shows off their level of narcissism.

Another problem I see with the tight coupling between votes and reputation is that questions that address more common problems will create a higher traffic than those with a very narrow domain. Questions with high traffic and their answers are more likely to get upvoted than those with low traffic. This is not a bad thing by itself, but because upvoting creates reputation I see lots of people accumulating insane amounts of reputation for explaining very basic principles of programming while others who provide sophisticated answers to quite complicated problems receive very little reputation for doing so. I'm not trying to discredit anybody or saying that reputation scores are meaningless, but because of how the system works I believe that they are distorted and not easily comparable.

Coming to an end now: It's too late for that, but if I could make a substantial change to the way SO works, I'd completely decouple votes and reputation. Instead I'd attribute some sort of credits to people depending on their level of participation on this site. These credits wouldn't show up anywhere on their public profile, but they could spend them on other users to increase their reputation.

This is only an idea, which would probably require some more thinking and field testing to actually make it work, but I believe that by decoupling votes and reputation we would see two effects:

1. It would become clearer to users what they achieve by voting for questions (better search results) and they would be more inclined to do so, because there's no reputation change involved for the person asking. Thus we would see more questions being up- or downvoted.

2. It would increase the comparability of reputation scores and the scores would better reflect who's actually reputable in the community.

I know that this would be a fundamental change to SO and its siblings and that there's no chance for it to ever become reality, but perhaps someone will read this before launching the next Q/A site and hopefully consider it a reasonable suggestion.

I also hope I'm not getting flamed now for questioning the reputation system ;-)

I know this might sounds a bit odd to some of you, but I didn't really see a place to vote.

Yeah, there are big honkin arrows, but they didn't jump out at me.

I kinda expected to vote on the question on the main browse page too, as done on other sites.

My suggestion, add + and - to the arrows. Yes, the Department of Redundancy Department.

I see a down vote as indication that the question is a "bad" question, rather than a "stupid" one. There are no stupid questions, as has been stated. However, there are bad questions --- insufficient information, poorly formulated, no attempt to solve the problem self, no research into possible solution, please do my homework for me, and so on. These type of questions are distinguishable (I believe) from those indicating that the questioner is struggling with the concepts and does need some help. A down vote prompts the questioner to put some effort into finding a solution and researching the problem a little before asking the community to bail him/her out.

Perhaps by the time you've finished reading a really good question, the voting controls have been scrolled off the top of the page.

My rule of thumb is, if I found a question with an answer that is perfect for what I needed to know, they both get a vote up, unless the answer is already accepted (I know), AND if I am answering a question, I definitely vote the question up. It's worth something to have a clear, focused, and answerable question. Anything I can actually write an answer to falls into that description.

Upvoting questions should be reflecting that people who ask questions which lead to good answers are contributing to the knowledge base of the site. This currently is not working well.

This seems to be a problem with all such sites. I was just over on a site based on a model very much like SO. This site is still very new so it is not being flooded with questions. I asked two very basic questions (the type that should be in any wiki about the subject) neither had been asked on the website (and before someone comments they happened to be questions I didn't know the answer too). Both questions received answers and those answers received votes.

Someone wrote that often the question is not useful to them so they don't upvote it, but that the answer to that same question is useful, so they upvote the answer to that same quetion. Is that really the system working as intended? How wasn't the question helpful in that it was what led to the helpful answer?

Reasonable solutions I can think of:

Encourage those answering questions to upvote with a reminder if they have not already. Perhaps even a suggested list on how to evaluate questions (question is of wide interest, question adds to the technical knowledge base of SO, etc).

Alternatively, all answers should give some value (even if less than an actual upvote). Given that questions can be closed (which should remove points given for that question) and people can use comments (which probably should be used far more then downvoting).

Another approach would be when someone upvotes an answer to have the fly out ask about and allow voting on the question.

Yet another that answers who do not rate the question do not receive full points for their answers.

I interact with SO (and the related sites) in two entirely different modes. In the first mode, I specifically come to SO. I am looking for questions to answer or looking to see if there have been responses for me. (I guess in theory I could come to ask a question, but I never do that.) In that mode I vote on many answers but few questions. I try to remember to upvote a question I answer, but I don't always do it.

In the second mode I have a problem. I am at a search engine, or have been enlightened and started at SO, and I am searching. When I find the answer to my problem, I upvote some of the answers, and I ALWAYS upvote the question. Because someone took the time to ask this ages ago, I get the answer now, not in a few minutes (or, gasp, hours) from now. My upvote is my thankyou.

Assuming others are like me, I would expect to see that answer voting has increased as Google and Bing rankings for the site have improved. Can anyone confirm that?

I hate to be Mr. Pessimist here, but I don't think voting will ever become a key component of Stack Overflow. The nature of the site is one in which voting is a filtering mechanism, and a way to help "face" content. However, I have no problem with that, and I actually prefer it. The goal of this site in my eyes, is instead to be a quick (but accurate) resource where programmers can ask questions, and get questions answered. It should also have a robust search feature, and be highly optimized for SEO so that programmers can use it as a long-standing and reliable resource. I really liked Yahoo! Answers for that reason. It was Q&A, plain and simple.

I really do hope that developers come here and have fun and participate because they enjoy the community, and enjoy helping others learn. If the elitism is absent, and a general notion of common sense and friendliness is apparent, this site will be a success.

The answer is easy for me - the site lets me vote on an answer in the same "place" that I read it, but I have to navigate to a new page to vote on a question. When I read down the long lists of questions, I see plenty that are obviously good questions, but since they aren't in my area of expertise, I don't bother opening the link, and I don't bother voting for the question. On the other hand, when I see a good answer, one click votes on it, and without taking me out of my "reading flow".

Add the "vote up/down" affordances to the question list pages, and I bet you'll see question voting take a substantial jump.

It might be because everyone's too busy using their votes on "threads" like this one. I think maybe we're trying to express two things with the question voting system, both that a question was a good one that everyone can learn from, and that a question needs attention from the community. Toss in the notion that lots of people are using votes to recognize the fun factor in a subjective question or to reinforce their opinion while "answering" such questions, and you can see why questions maybe aren't getting their due.

It is instructive to note that at the time this was written, the only two gold-badge level questions involve how to use this site (shouldn't that be in the faq?), and a "what do you think?" that's taken place on nearly every active board in the world. Two of the "Questions" filters are already drowning in noise.

Give a separate badge for rating questions.

Maybe a question should not be voted per se, but have a kind of ranking based on how many and how high scorings answers it has.

I like the reputation restrictions. They keep me from making strange misinterpretations of concepts like 'down' and 'up' until I've had a chance to assimilate more of the culture here. Spending more time reading, rather than clicking, improves my feel for what each click would mean.

Rating based on 'useful' makes sense to me for answers, but not so much for questions. A thread might be useful, but the question itself? Well, the most I could say about one ordinarily is that it was interesting or thought-provoking.

Maybe instead of up/down voting, there could be a ranking for how general the question is? For example, the likelihood of others finding it useful.

I never vote on questions because it doesn't make sense to me. Which question is "better?"

• How do I handle mouse clicks on a QTableView in Qt?
• Why do I have to set my static variables outside of my class in C++?

I just see them as two different people having a frustrating time with whatever their current language is.

Sorry about the sad truth: I skip the question entirely ^[1] and scroll straight down to the top answers. More often than not I hit jackpot on first try, as the answer seems to address my question perfectly fine*.

It's a TL;DR feeling. Do you re-read your Google/Bing search queries before you start scrolling down the results?

*Yes on rare occasions I might check the question for some details just to verify if indeed it matches up to my issue.

Just posted a dupe question to this one (accidentally) so here is my question text as I am going to delete the duplicate:

I have noticed that when going into questions there can regularly be several answers to a legitimate question. The question is thoughtful, useful, well presented and yet has garnered no up-votes.

Surely if you are answering a question, then your first thought should be to upvoting it. I mean its in all our best interests surely, because the natural SO process will ensure that good questions feature prominently.

Nobody seems to think twice about upvoting 'Subjective' questions, which in my opinion (although I am guilty of some too) should not be applicable to upvoting, only to favourite<-ing> (Have I shot myself in the foot here with this highly subjective question?)

Its costs nothing to up-vote a legitimate, well-asked and useful question so why are people so reluctant?

I guess that this is the best place to put this...

Who comes to Stack Overflow with the idea that "I really need to know something, but I'm not sure what it is. I'll look at the top-voted questions and find out what question I need answered"?

No one.

You search to find questions you need. You tag topics you are involved with and watch for your tags on the front page.

When you've found the question you need, you read the answers, paying special attention, perhaps, to the accepted answer, to answers that have lots of upvotes, and to answers from people you recognize, or who have high reputations.

To me, it's silly to compare stats of the questions and answers, because they are apples and oranges.

I try vote everyday on questions of the topics I find interesting (opencv tag) so people get encouraged to keep asking. Also I think it is good to vote (as the person who asks) up for those answers that try to help and are correct even if they are not really helpful or not the answer you would consider perfect.

I think that people in general is kind of greedy with voting and there are several good questions/ansawers with 0 votes that probably not many people will read.

I've noticed those who don't adequately understand the problem are not upvoted and sometimes downvoted, frequently being that person myself.

In my defense, a loss for vocabulary and preference for speed are the culprits, but I wouldn't be asking if I couldn't solve it myself. I can live with it as long as my question is answered correctly. I've got now ~20 points for a confirmed answer! Less than the possible 25 because I'm on upvote restriction.

I also like good "uncorrect" answers and can pay at least ~6.66 points for those too.

Things that make you go "hmmm".

As a possible solution, what about giving reputation for the number of views of a question to the question poster? Then again, bad questions could get a lot of views too. A multiplier on the current score, perhaps? But then this would make the system dynamic. Although you could just take into account the score at the current time when a view is made, and use fractional reputation scores which are rounded up / down. It's a tough problem.

Another solution might be upvotes / downvotes carrying more weight from users with more points.

I don't know why people don't vote, but one way to get people to vote more would be to provide a badge incentive that requires a lot of involvement. One suggested would be to extend Vox Populi - Used the maximum 40 votes in a day with

Max Vox Populi - Used the maximum 40 votes in a day 100 times.

or a somewhat better yet even worse suggestion:

Vote Distribution - Used the maximum 40 votes in a day 100 times on non-consecutive days.

My idea is to remove the up/down arrows for questions completely, and completely replace the functionality provided by the 'upvote' arrow with the already-existing 'favourite' mechanism that allows you to keep track of posts, but would now give upvotes to the user (some kind of multiple perhaps), providing the question is not flagged and removed.

Unique SO user view count may also contribute to score. The flag mechanism would provide the 'downvoting' functionality, and removed questions would contribute negatively to score.