Does upvoting or downvoting have an affect on where the content my appear?

Question

To clarify my question a bit. When users upvote or downvote a question or comment does it affect where the question appears? For an example if a question is downvoted does it get pushed down the list of questions? If a question is upvoted does it get pushed up the list of questions?

I was also thinking that if the voting feature has no relationship to the content, then it's merely just for points. I tried searching for my answer but, didn't find anything similiar.

If there is a post on this please share the link.:)

Answer 1

Maybe for hotness calculation, and sort questions by voltes. For the rest of the other pages I don't think there's much relevance to it.

Even searches seem to be mostly based on 'content included words' and maybe chronological order.
Unless the algorithm has been updated.

• What search technology does Q2A use?
• Search exact matches relevance?

I believe Points were firstly introduced for gamification. To keep users engaged in answering questions, to show a token of appreciation, and easily distinguish relevant content.

Comments

Thanks for your answer. The way Q2A is setup their voting feature makes sense. Thanks for adding the links for the search function. However, I don't use the Q2A search. I integrated Google search because I plan to have multi-site options later and wanted the search to include other sites as well.

I haven't had the time to play with the Google search to see how it works yet. I am hoping that Google search will be able to pickup tags within the sites.