The ratio of votes to views on Stack Overflow in general seems fairly small for both questions and answers. This seems to be true for questions with few votes as well as for some of the most famous questions on the site, such as this one with over 13k votes but a Votes-to-Views ratio of only 0.3%.

So what is the average (and median) ratio of votes to views on Stack Overflow? Can it be broken down to show views from only logged-in users?

Here's a similar question, which has been answered using a SEDE query (nothing I'm familiar with): What is the average vote on accepted answers?

While searching for an answer I stumbled upon a few interesting posts on site mechanics and how the site stats work, including this one which is two-and-a-half years old, has 33 upvotes and still remains unanswered. Why are the "stats" only available for 10k users?

And here's a discussion from around the same time regarding the fact that unanswered questions were over-promoted, driving down site quality. As far as I can tell from my user experience so far, this issue remains valid. The Stack Overflow homepage is over-emphasizing bad questions (and a proposed solution)

As far as badges are concerned, there are three badges rewarded based on the number of views a question receives, but none for the votes-to-views ratio, which is arguably a better measure of quality. Promoting questions with a high votes-to-view ratio could go some way towards balancing the alleged over-promotion of unanswered questions.

And finally, wouldn't it be nice to be able to sort questions based on views?

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  • I feel there'd be a lot of outliers for this type of question. This makes it difficult to generalise problems. I think they fall into 3 categories, very niche or poor questions probably get 10-20 views, others accumulate a few hundred, and a few accumulate 10k+. If you're looking to address problems with the majority of questions you might want to discount the outliers. To answer your last question, the ones with the most views are often terribly easy questions ("How do I make bold in HTML") or ones that sound funny ("How do I murder a race of flying elves" from Worldbuilding Stackexchange) – NibblyPig Mar 27 '17 at 13:54
  • @NibblyPig, According to Kevin's answer, the standard deviation is higher than the mean, which suggests that there are indeed outliers in the data. It also suggests we should look at the mean as well. But note that the outliers (in views to votes) are then ones that might be particularly interesting, so it would be nice to be able to filter those out from the pack. And terribly easy questions might be terribly good questions, especially if you are new to a topic and want to learn quickly by plugging in to the collective knowledge on SO. – Egalth Apr 2 '17 at 8:35
  • Also, @NibblyPig, if it were easier to browse through the terribly easy questions, then maybe the amount of newly posted poor questions would drop, since newcomers to the site might find that what they are looking for is already available, rather than repeat questions that have already been answered. – Egalth Apr 2 '17 at 8:37

I think this is it for questions.

select avg(value)
from (
    select cast(count(v.Id) as float) / p.ViewCount as value
    from Votes v, Posts p
    where v.VoteTypeId in (2, 3)
        and p.Id = v.PostId
        and p.posttypeid = 1
    group by p.ViewCount, p.id
) t

It comes out at 0.014 votes per view (or 1.4%).

With a little more effort we could kind of do answers (you'd need to determine the answer's question to get the viewcount) but the answer figure would be inaccurate because late answers would get too high a viewcount (thanks to psubsee2003 for pointing that out).

  • 6
    The answer piece wiuld assume the answer was posted at the same time as the question. A late answer would be skewed – psubsee2003 Mar 24 '17 at 22:47
  • Indeed, you can only really get an accurate result for questions. – Robert Longson Mar 24 '17 at 22:48
  • 1
    So, for every one hundred people that view a given question, one of them will vote on it. – user4639281 Mar 25 '17 at 1:02
  • 1
    Thanks @RobertLongson! That's seems reasonable based on my casual observations. Any thoughts on how to distinguish between logged-in users and guests? I suspect there would be a significant difference. – Egalth Mar 25 '17 at 8:58
  • @Egalth I don't know how to distinguish those reliably in SEDE – Robert Longson Mar 25 '17 at 9:11
  • @RobertLongson that is in postfeedback, votetypeid has the same meaning as in votes. – rene Mar 25 '17 at 9:30
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    @Egalth guests (or as SE calls them anonymous) users can't vote. The view count is kind of stupid and can count the same user more than once. – Braiam Mar 25 '17 at 17:21
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    If views include people who can't vote, then votes-per-views is... suspect. If the user insists on having a figure anyway just come up with something/anything and save the coding :-) – Bill Woodger Mar 25 '17 at 18:59
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    @TinyGiant I suspect some of those views are bots. It would be nice if there were a way for the forum software to differentiate between people and bot visits. – Peter L. Mar 26 '17 at 4:30
  • It would also be nice to be able to distinguish by points to see if there's a difference in behavior between people with few points and people with many. – gman Mar 27 '17 at 14:38
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    @RobertLongson, I think I didn't explain myself clearly. I don't want to know what points the person has. I want to know if people with lots of points vote more than people with few or no points. In other words does their many contributions translate into more voting behavior or is it about the same as the rest of the voting community. – gman Mar 27 '17 at 15:36
  • 2
    @gman Perhaps I didn't explain myself clearly. The stack exchange data explorer would allow us to see whether someone has lots of points now, what it does not allow is to see when someone viewed a question and whether, at that time they had lots of points. Maybe someone has 20K now but 5 years ago when they viewed the question, they had 1 rep so couldn't have voted. – Robert Longson Mar 27 '17 at 15:40

Running this query, I get an average of 0.0134 votes per view with a standard deviation of 0.0173 votes per view.


If you produce a scatter plot of votes against views you will see that the ratio is not approximately constant: it seems that great questions (many views and votes) get proportionately few votes. I guess people believe that a question with many votes does not "deserve" more.

Consequently, the average votes per view is not a very useful measure.

  • 1
    Interesting. Do you have that plot to share with us? Not sure I follow that logic, though. Many votes and many views does not necessarily imply that the question is good. A great question can have very few views and votes (because it's a niche topic, for example), and those are the gems that would be nice to identify. Whether or not that would be useful remains a little speculative. – Egalth Apr 6 '17 at 16:51
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    My guess is that they get proportionally fewer votes because they attract lots of outside traffic, which means lots of non-voting readers. It is a difficult metric to use, indeed. – duplode May 24 at 22:16

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