<p>I can answer this from the perspective of someone who has <em>given</em> clumps of up-votes to users at various points in time, often for old obscure answers.  As <a href="https://stats.meta.stackexchange.com/users/35989/tim">Tim</a> correctly points out in his answer, this generally starts off either when a profile piques my interest through a good question or answer in the main thread, or simply from browsing through profiles on the ranking pages.  Like most people, when I look at profiles, I usually start by looking at the user's top answers, which are always very good, but for reasons that I explain below, I then look at the last page of their answers with all the zero-vote answers.</p>

<p>I recall seeing a few comments on this site (sorry, can't remember where I saw them) lamenting the fact that there are many good answers to questions that receive zero votes.  There are many times when a user puts in a lot of effort to give a good answer, and for one reason or another it does not get any votes.  For this reason, when I'm looking at profiles, I now make the effort to skip to the end of the answer pages to look at all the answers that a user has made that have received zero votes, or only one or two votes.  Often I find quite a few of these that are worthy of an up-vote, and ---voila--- the user now has a nice clump of up-votes on old obscure answers they made.</p>

<p>I have done this with a few users now, just owing to getting interested in an answer they wrote, and then looking at their profile page.  (Sorry, I can't remember if you're one of them.)  I'm not sure if that makes me a "superfan" or "stalker" of the profiles I've looked at (a touch derogatory if you ask me), but I have certainly found that users often have a treasure-trove of good answers with zero votes, or low votes, which are deserving of more recognition.</p>
