<p>TL;DR The system promotes popular questions, but popular might not need to align with characteristics that are desirable. Especially complex and difficult questions might be very desirable, but difficult to showcase in a popular way. If we would want to changes this, then how can we do this?</p>
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<p>I saw among the questions with bounties a question that interested me:</p>
<p><a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/434561/">How is EMSE derived for causal trees in Athey and Imbens (PNAS 2016)?</a></p>
<p>But I had a hard time to follow it (a bunch of formula's that don't make immediately sense to me, to be fair in light of my further &quot;complaint&quot;, these type of questions might be improved). It requires either previous knowledge or some amount of research effort to understand the topic.</p>
<p>The question had an answer, but I don't understand it enough at first glance in order to give it an up-vote. (and while working on my second glance, I think that I will only get it during my third or higher try).</p>
<p>I imagine that this is the case for many other questions and many other people. Many interesting questions don't get attention, because we have a voting system that punishes them.</p>
<p><sup>I know for my personal situation that some of the answers that I value myself as very good, are not very well received. And at the same time some answers that I value myself as very bad (or not much special) are very well received.</sup></p>
<p><strong>The consequence is that these type of posts that might be very good (although difficult to understand by most people), but receive much less attention (measured by up-votes, which is a system that has a strong positive feedback loop as popularity leads to more votes and popularity is acquired by votes).</strong></p>
<p>The consequence of the up-vote system is that topics that are less popular or known, will receive less up-votes (obviously). It is questionable whether we want 'popular' votes to dominate the presence on the website. Those popular questions are often the simple questions (or the ones that got a boost via the 'hot network questions') and maybe, the network should turn towards a direction of improving the quality of more sophisticated questions and answers? (maybe the stackexchange software neural network that selects these hot topics should use a bit more randomness like adding an extra dropout layer? Or use a different way to evaluate the 'success' of it's actions.)</p>
<p>I am not sure whether it is possible to turn the direction of the website, and whether this is even desirable. Maybe answering simple questions is the formula that works well. And, it can be an interesting endeavor to make slightly simple questions even more simple with good answers (that's the area where I am placed, I can only hit a few of the difficult topics). But, the popularity of the simpler questions is overshadowing the more difficult questions, and I have a feeling that this doesn't value those questions in the right way. Popularity is not the sole measure of relevance, and certainly not of quality. If we want to improve quality, then maybe we should have more ways beyond the voting system that relies entirely on (self-reinforcing) popularity.</p>
