# What is the distribution of the difference between question upvotes and the largest upvoted answer?

For a given question, the question itself has Q net upvotes and an maximal upvoted answer with net upvotes A. These can be negative and if there are no answers we can let A be zero. What is the distribution of A-Q on this site? I'm pretty sure the average is positive.

## 1 Answer

Here's a query which calculates the average value of $A-Q$ over the last month. The highest upvoted answer gets, on average, $.68$ more upvotes than the question does. A graph of the differences is generated by this query (where extreme differences of $>10$ are excluded from the range, as they're relatively uncommon anyways). The distribution has a mode at a difference of $0$, but that is not far tailed by a difference of $1$ - it looks almost symmetric about a difference of $\frac{1}2$.

• As an aside, the distribution on meta is a very different story. – Milo Brandt Feb 22 '15 at 19:55
• That (main distribution) looks almost perfectly gaussian :D – AlexR Mar 6 '15 at 1:20
• People don't seem to upvote questions at all on the main site, yet every now and them some obvious homework breaks through, but it never goes higher than the answer. – Alec Teal Mar 7 '15 at 18:23