How to encourage users to vote more?

Question

Voting on questions and answers is an important moderation privilege that is awarded to the users at the early stage. Currently there are 40 users that can vote questions and answers up and 17 users that can vote questions and answers down. Voting helps determine which posts are useful. Answers for each question are sorted by votes. Highly voted answers are displayed first, so the user sees the best answer at the top. Downvotes on questions and answers help determine which posts need an improvement. Moderators and users that reach enough points can edit questions and answers to improve them, however they need to be identified first. Finally, users that provide useful content are rewarded for their content and get access to more tools faster thanks to upvotes.

Despite many users having access to voting and this privilege being available soon, users vote very infrequently. Is there anything we can do to help increase the number of votes? Should this feature be more exposed? Should there be a separate notification/page that encourages voting? Or maybe there are other reasons users do not engage in voting? I'm curious to hear your opinions.

I'll end it up with a simple statistic:
Total posts on this site (questions/answers/comments): around 1800
Total votes casted: around 1000

That's way less than a single vote on a post on average.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Since I've been frequenting this website a lot on the past months, I can say that it is somewhat interesting on how people tend to avoid down voting or up voting here. I thought possibilities to help out with this issue (on a indirect manner):

Bonus for commenting and voting:

If you up vote or down vote an answer or question and comment on it, you may have an additional small bonus point (+1?) for it. This would make the engagement more rewarding, welcoming more feedback on a answer or question (also, this system it would not differentiate if the provided feedback on the comment is criticism or a compliment).

Approved bonus by the asker for very helpful comments or answers aiming to improve the question:

Sometimes a user may struggle with text construction or even with the English language. Sometimes they can't even explain correctly a concept or mechanism of the game due to being extremely inexperienced with Tibia. A helpful comment or answer (even one that ended up down voting the question) would be very appreciated in order to make the website more busy and friendly to newcomers (pay attention that such bonus would only be granted if the fore mentioned helpful comment made a vote on the question). An extra point to the asker that selected the answer or comment as helpful would be realli good ot implement on this case here.

Extra badges related to voting that can reward you additionally with points once you unlock the badge would be a great feature as well.

Comments

I was thinking about those ideas as well, but I'm a little concerned adding any bonus to voting. People may start to vote only to get more reputation points and won't care about the content of the voted post at all. Bonus that needs to be approved by the post owner sounds better - it's something worth considering. Thanks!

Answer 2

Something that would be nice is to make people who can vote in tibiqa regular site could also vote in meta.tibiaqa, its a little annoying since I don’t use meta much but during events (for example) I can’t vote only add comments... I don’t know if its a good idea or something worth making just giving my opinion...