Recently, meta has seen an uprising of questions related to downvotes/toxicity of the community etc. There are posts mentioning behaviour towards younger users, random downvotes etc.
But I have seen none (if there is, please correct me) talking about another index of this toxicity: the low amount of upvotes on questions.
I've been using MSE for quite a considerable time. I sincerely didn't see much change on the downvote behaviour, and downvotes are given a big highlight in discussion. However, upvoting seems to have decreased a lot in the recent times. I've been making this experience in the recent weeks: I go to the front page and scroll down all questions. Sometimes, $80\%$ of the questions are not voted at all. Some questions have $3$ answers and are not voted. I think this may be an interesting phenomenon to consider.
Therefore, I have two objectives with this post:
- Could someone come up with the statistics that would prove/disprove my assertion that upvotes have considerably diminished?
- If that is the case, why do you think this is happening?
And one of the points I wish to make is: whenever people seem to complain about the behaviour, they touch the downvotes. They may touch the upvotes-issue, but the focus is always on downvotes. However, I think that low spread of upvotes has its consequences. To ask a question and not receive attention makes people less inclining to ask. They will ask only if they have a "perfect" question in some sense. Meanwhile, people not acquainted to the site will ask away anyway, since they do not care. And then we end up having more chance of a flood of bad questions, since we do not encourage enough the good ones
OBS: The title of the question is intended to be dual to this one, which was poorly received.