How does a question get fewer votes than an answer?

Question

This is a review site, so the questions should be voted on whether or not they are on-topic and if they clearly portrayed their code so that it could be reviewed.

If a question has 4 answers, yes, it may be badly written code, but it still works and shows signs it can be improved. All the answers are up voted, a lot, but the question has fewer votes than the accepted answer.

The logic escapes me.

One example: How can I make this method shorter and easier to follow?

Question = 8 votes (counting mine)
Accepted answer = 12 votes ( not counting mine )

Answer 1

It's a frequently asked question: Why do questions need votes, too? has many duplicates.

There's no consensus here on why a question should be upvoted: see this link to chat

My voting policy is:

• Upvote all answers which I think are helpful (to thank the person who spent the time to answer)
• Downvote any answer which I think is wrong or harmful
• Upvote the fewer than all questions which:
  • I think or hope other people will find especially interesting
  • I find especially interesting and for which I'd like to see more answers
  • I think are especially well-asked (clearly written, researched, effort put into asking the question)
• Downvote any question which I dislike, e.g. because IMO it cannot be answered well, but which is good enough that I can't vote to close it

Therefore I upvote answers more frequently than I do questions (and downvote rarely). I upvote most (not all) question that I answer myself (because I at least thought they were worth answering).

Of the three reasons I gave to upvote a question, the first two above are intended to encourage more answers to this question. The third is intended to encourage future questions from the OP.

Answer 2

Usually on Code Review, those who answer tend to put more effort in their answer than the person who is asking the question.

To ask a question, you can basically copy-paste some code that you have written and ask "How can I improve this code?". That doesn't make it a good question.

To answer a question, you need to ask yourself: What is this code doing? How could it be done better? Having a lot of programming experience helps to answer a question, but the most difficult part of answering is to "BE the code". Understanding what code is doing isn't always easy.

For the question you linked here, I am down-voting it because it's a simple "copy-paste" question, the asker does not make it easier in any way for reviewers to answer the question. See also: Questions should include a description of what the code does . There is absolutely no explaining the code whatsoever in that question.