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Has there recently been statistically less upvoting than usual? I know I should answer questions for the love of it and not care about rep, but I've been sort of discouraged as of late.

Out of my last three answers I have 1 total upvote (which honestly I only got because I guilted the poster into giving it to me, then felt bad and deleted the comment).

Maybe my answers were bad to receive such little upvoting, but two of them were accepted as full answers and the third one the poster commented saying, "Thank you for the wonderful post."

I won't feel so bad if this is just something happening across the board. So does anyone know if upvoting has been weak lately? Thanks!

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    $\begingroup$ Generally, the more technical the answer, the fewer the readers, so the fewer the votes. $\endgroup$
    – Bill Dubuque
    Nov 28, 2012 at 2:04
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    $\begingroup$ I sometimes feel the same. I feel that we need to bump that meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/662/vote-early-vote-often question. In particular with reference to Pete L. Clark's answer. I also feel that often a sense of sportsmanship (voting "competing" answers) is missing, and frankly I got a bit tired of being the only one voting the competing answers (e.g. I have several threads where there are 3-4 answers and none of them is voted at all), and I have actually began voting less recently due to this. I agree that this should be corrected. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Nov 28, 2012 at 2:09
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    $\begingroup$ Your last 4 answers have a total of 7 upvotes. Your last 8 answers have a total of 27 upvotes. I don't know what trends there may be, but your last 3 answers aren't good data. It reminds me of a news story I saw today on 19 boys born in a row in a hospital: www1.whdh.com/news/articles/must-see/12009175287383/…. I hope you don't feel bad regardless. $\endgroup$
    – Jonas Meyer
    Nov 28, 2012 at 4:31
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    $\begingroup$ @JonasMeyer If you go more than 4 answers ago, then you are already well over a month old. I don't count this as "recent" anymore. Also, you included a community wiki on "study habits" which will of course have an abnormally high amount of votes (in my case 11), and I don't remember, but probably doesn't count towards rep. We could play this game all day. If we look only at accepted answers, then 4 out of the past 6 only have 1 upvote. Going 8 total answers back is pretty absurd considering it is 3 months old. $\endgroup$
    – Matt
    Nov 28, 2012 at 5:15
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    $\begingroup$ My impression (for which I have no numerical evidence whatever) is that there has been a spike in number of questions asked. This makes it harder for users to read every question that might interest them, and they can't vote up answers they don't even have time to look at. $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    Nov 28, 2012 at 6:27
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    $\begingroup$ I've been mostly inactive since January, and I only recently starting being active again. I see two huge changes from the beginning of 2012: There are a lot more questions than there used to be, so questions scroll off the front page much faster. And, yes, there is a lot less upvoting. I suspect the latter is mostly due to the fact that there are a lot more questions, as Gerry Myerson argues. $\endgroup$
    – Mike Spivey
    Nov 28, 2012 at 18:13
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    $\begingroup$ @Mike! It's great to have you back! $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Nov 28, 2012 at 18:31
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    $\begingroup$ Well, Matt, your profile says that you have neither the Suffrage nor the Vox populi badge and that you gave out reputation of 72*5 + 207*10 = 2430 which is just barely more than the 2154 you got, so where should the reputation come from if everyone deserves to get more than they gave out? Anyway, all the suspicions in this comment thread are far better analysed on the data site. $\endgroup$
    – Phira
    Nov 29, 2012 at 1:26

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As proposed in my comment, I ran this query on data.SE:

http://data.stackexchange.com/mathematics/query/87290/post-reputation-over-time

This bears out that there has been a recent drop by half a vote per answer in the last two months from 3 to 2,5. Clearly, old posts are sometimes upvoted later on, but based on my own reputation, I estimate late votes to contribute not more than 10% which would not completely explain the drop.

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    $\begingroup$ Interestingly, another query shows that the average number of views per question has decreased significantly data.stackexchange.com/mathematics/query/89749 Over the last three months, Math Stack Exchange has seen nearly a doubling of the number of questions asked data.stackexchange.com/mathematics/query/89750 $\endgroup$
    – Eric Naslund
    Dec 25, 2012 at 8:53
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    $\begingroup$ Very nice. It looks to me as if, besides a general downward trend, the average rep per answer is higher between June and August, with a smaller peak around December. I wonder why that could be... :) $\endgroup$
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Dec 25, 2012 at 20:31

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