<blockquote>
  <p>To what extent is this a common experience of new answerers? Do we lose noticeable number of potentially active participants this way?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Probably. I certainly answer less because of it (not that I'm important at all of course). The main issue is probably the fact that people come here for an answer, then leave when they don't get one. So they are not around to upvote late answers to their question. But that might be my fault for sometimes liking to go through older unanswered questions to give them an answer.</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>Is there some way to avoid this?</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I can suggest two things that might help off the top of my head. Although, there's probably some huge issues I haven't thought of yet.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>What if we gave more medals/badges for voting? Maybe in a recurring manner? I thought about giving a tiny amount of rep (e.g., x rep every 1000 upvotes), but that's too easy to abuse.</p></li>
<li><p>Regarding the backlog, a lot answers, especially late answers to older questions, simply sit without being accepted nor upvoted. So they will be in the unanswered queue forever I guess(?). [Sorry if I misunderstand the system]. If there was a mechanism for the community to accept answers to "dead questions", it would probably help with this. (E.g., if the questioner hadn't logged in for n months, the question can go into an "old questions with answers" queue, and if enough people vote for it, it could get accepted). This might encourage people to answer some more older questions as well.</p></li>
</ol>
