Accepting without upvoting

Question

What could be the reason for accepting an answer but not upvoting it? Situations:

1. Accepting own answer - ok, no upvote on self-answers
2. OP not having 15 reputation cannot upvote. I think that OP should be able to upvote answers on his/her questions even if he/she does not have 15 points yet.
3. Uninformed or rude, does not care, got his/her answer, checks and leaves.
4. Got some answer, but does not see it as good enough? What? ...should not accept.

I simply cannot think of valid scenairo (except self-answer) when you (OP) would accept but not upvote an answer. Should't the upvote be automatic on accept? (I mean automated by SE - feature request.)

EDIT: To make myself clear, I would like to propose, that accepted answers be upvoted automaticaly, except for self answers. This automatic upvote should not count towards daily limit (max 40). My reasoning is, that accepted answer is helpful and should not be accepted otherwise.

Answer 1

Technical limitations:

• Upvotes require 15 rep. Accepts do not.
• Self-Answers can not be upvoted.
• Every user is limited to 40 votes per day. Accepts are not subject to that limitation

Non-Technical side:

I don't think it's conductive to the culture of any SE site to speculate about the intentions of OP. But just for the sake of argument, let's go there:

• User does not know / understand there are votes at all. They started interacting with the internet in places where votes were not a thing (random xyz forum). But they noticed that cool checkmark thing on some forum out there to mark the answer that solved a thread (e.g. MSDN)
• User puts in the "accept" because the answer was helpful, but doesn't like the advice, so doesn't add a "like"
• User dislikes the notion of votes
• ...?

This list can probably be extended by quite a bit... Trying to understand votes is not really a helpful way to spend time, because unless you're explicitly told what a vote is and why it's that way, you can only guess the reasons behind a vote (or lack thereof).

Answer 2

Retrospective (self-answer)

I have created this question because of pt2 - OP not having 15 reputation cannot upvote (real situation you can find in edit history), but I have thought this topic through before asking, comming up with four points, the first being just obvious, second being the reason and last two being my struggle understanding what is happening (why is SE set up as it is). Finally boiling it up to suggestion, which was not so clear at first, so I had to edit the question after Vogel's answer, to make it clear, understanding it was not so - suggestion (feature request - marked as such from the beginning), not just asking about the state. This is, btw, the reason I did not accept his answer - not answering the full content/question - but the very fact also brings thoughts and questions about the very topic and possible answer to pt4, because I was tempted to accept the answer as generally accepted without trully accepted by me. That is interesting possibility, but I stay firm: that is not the correct use of accept - I would just get rid of it, not mark the correct answer (there is still none).

The answer

I would gladly accept Andrew's comment answer: It has been requested since 2009, and declined in 2012, because to me it reads: it may not be viable for every SE sub-domain and even if it was good for CR, it won't get implemented, because... ehm, read the comments below the question for yourself.

Disecting the points

• pt1 - self-answer - obvious
• pt2 - not enought reputation - I stay firm, they should be allowed to do so. Prohibiting users to upvote answers of their question only discouradges them to ever upvote - because they cannot do so now/immediately and won't notice and understand when they can, because they are currently denied the experience from the very beginning. The only reason for this (counter)measure I can think of is that some users could create alter-egos to upvote their own questions or answers to gain reputation. But finding those and deleting them will remove all upvotes making this strategy not usefull... unless the moderators or AI cannot cope with the sheer numbers (which could be the truth for SO, althought certainly not for CR and many other SE-subs).
• pt3 - that is the plague, partially created by what I have described above in pt2 and Vogel612 prtially addresses in his answer too.
• pt4 - and that is what I think many do and I myself was thinking about when considering to accept Vogel612's answer. NO, that is wrong. I can imagine that my own drive for the suggestion could be to get upvotes on my own answers and I cannot fully deny that, I am still a human, but my true drive was to make it even for everybody, to give everybody what they deserve. The question could still be about the numbers: 10+15; and about what to do when OP later accepts different answer (my solution: keep +10 upvote, remove 15 for accepted ... or maybe remove even less, because it could have been the correct answer at that time, but not today, because e.g. we got new C++ standard).