We could use some API queries to get real numbers on those questions, rather than judging the state-of-affairs by how things appear to us. (prone to confirmation bias)
I can only speak for my own reasons to vote:
- The topic interest me, and the post was informative
- I know enough about a topic to feel my vote is a good indicator for other users.
Reasons not to vote:
- I don't know enough about the specific area mentioned in the title, so I won't even read the Question / Answers.
- "Wall of Text" answers, bug me :)
You can look at the top voters for week / month / quarter, to get a sense of who's doing what.
Possibly we could send reminders to people who log in, but don't show much voting activity
"Hey, our visitors rely on people like you to vote on good answers, please vote or leave a comment to help strengthen weak content" .
Who votes?
Some people it seems have time to answers questions, but don't care to vote much at all. So without doing a witchhunt here's the list of 15 top rep contributors and their total vote count. This is just a snapshot
User | Rep | Votes -----------------+-------+------- gandalf3 | 63.1k | 7155 iKlsR | 20.2k | 3706 ideasman42 | 19.7k | 1300 stacker | 18.5k | 5699 sambler | 16.1k | 1092 David | 15.1k | 1802 cegaton | 14.7k | 1385 zeffii | 14.5k | 1922 CoDEmanX | 13.4k | 442 Leon Cheung | 12.4k | 1175 Jerryno | 12.2k | 78 Chebhou | 11.4k | 893 Ray Mairlot | 10.6k | 344 NoviceInDisguise | 8.5k | 2352 CharlesL | 8.4k | 538 I think this shows that most of us who see a lot of posts also tend to vote on them, those who don't vote a lot are definitely in the minority -- I wouldn't worry about it.