I was very disappointed to see that we hit a record low in number of votes cast on our site this past week, despite us having a record high in number of total users and number of total questions on which to vote:
The reluctance that a lot of users here have, for voting, is something that is making the reputation standings extremely unfair towards early-stage users who were here in April-May 2020 when voting was rampant. I think we should keep voting the way we did at the beginning, and to remind ourselves of this Meta post (from a very experienced user):
"I would just like to remark that upvoting, in my opinion, should not be meant as some sort of "reward" to be given to exceptional answers (which is what bounties are for).
Personally, I ask myself a very simple question to decide whether I should upvote a question or answer: do I believe that this question/answer should be on this site? It's not really about the quality of the post, but more about indicating whether I think that this post is a good fit for the site. How good the post actually is will still be reflected in the upvotes, because a more useful post will be found by more people which will therefore hopefully vote it up more.
Consequently, I believe that upvotes should be given generously and without too much overthinking. On a practical level, this also encourages participation to the site, as many people like to see that their post was appreciated by others, and will therefore be more likely to stick around more when this happens."
What can we do (other than featuring on Meta, posts about voting more) to spread the word out to newer users, that voting is an extremely important part of how this site works and grows, and to encourage some of our older users, to get back into the early-stage mindset in which they were voting more often?