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It seems you can get upvoted for no apparent reason :)

Upvotes = quality

(source https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/270116/35989)

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    $\begingroup$ ... and enjoy your moment in the sun for about 10 minutes. $\endgroup$
    – Scortchi Mod
    Commented Mar 27, 2017 at 15:10
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    $\begingroup$ Some people want the voting badges so much that they vote indiscriminately for the maximum (40 votes) each day until they reach 600 votes, then stop. I believe we have such a user operating right now. I haven't tried to track them down--it's not worthwhile. In the past, complaints to the SE powers have gotten no response, so evidently this behavior is tolerated. $\endgroup$
    – whuber Mod
    Commented Mar 27, 2017 at 15:20
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    $\begingroup$ @whuber It's a pitty that there is no symphatizer badge for users with high number of upvotes for high-entropy answers... $\endgroup$
    – Tim
    Commented Mar 27, 2017 at 15:24
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    $\begingroup$ To answer the question in the title--no, of course not. I'm sure there's a correlation, e.g. if all I knew about two answers is that one is +20 and the other is -2, my best guess would be that the +20 is a better answer, but I think we've all seen plenty of answers of a low quality answer getting upvotes and high quality answers getting few upvotes...There are many possible reasons... Lack of understanding by the voter(s), voting score "momentum", and the popularity (or non-popularity) of the poster most likely all play a role. It's possible that trolls play a role too, as whuber indicates. $\endgroup$
    – GoF_Logistic
    Commented Mar 27, 2017 at 17:47
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    $\begingroup$ Yeah, this nonsense happens. I've seen a number of cases recently where posts that should in no way have had upvotes got one within minutes - or even seconds - of being posted. $\endgroup$
    – Glen_b Mod
    Commented Mar 27, 2017 at 21:19
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    $\begingroup$ I don't think this is really a duplicate. The linked question is about how answerers should be evaluated (presumably across all their answers), this question is just about the narrower issue of whether votes on a given answer correspond to answer quality. They are clearly related, but I don't think this needs to be closed. I'm voting to leave open. $\endgroup$
    – gung - Reinstate Monica
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 12:33
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    $\begingroup$ Tim, @Andre, I changed the title of this post, trying to match it to how I understood the main issue. Tim, your question body does not contain any answers so feel free to edit the title again if you feel that I did not capture your intention. Note that a question on Meta has to be a question. $\endgroup$
    – amoeba
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 15:34
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    $\begingroup$ I can't see the history of this. A benign hypothesis is that it once made sense and was upvoted accordingly but then the OP decided to withdraw it but did not know how to delete it, so scribbled over it. We've heard less benign guesses. $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 16:57
  • $\begingroup$ @NickCox There is a way to see the history, so it's easy to reject your benign hypothesis. See stats.stackexchange.com/posts/270116/revisions or even stats.stackexchange.com/posts/270116/timeline. $\endgroup$
    – amoeba
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 17:34
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    $\begingroup$ @Amoeba I didn't see that (and don't know why, as I've looked at edit histories before). As my suggestion might be an answer to other cases, I would want to give a little push to the principle that we shouldn't assume the worst explanation without explicit evidence. $\endgroup$
    – Nick Cox
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 17:39
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    $\begingroup$ @NickCox Sure. I wanted to share these links because they are not easy to find: the second one (with timeline) is, as far as I know, an undocumented feature in a sense that there is no way to find such timeline pages using the site navigation; one has to know the URL and type it manually. I discovered it only recently. The first link (with revisions) is easy to find once a post was edited at least once, but if a post has never been edited then this link is normally not displayed. $\endgroup$
    – amoeba
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 19:21
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    $\begingroup$ There's a possibility that Nick is right - it could happen that someone posts something more typical, it's upvoted but then vandalized by the OP all within the first few minutes (inside the time window when it doesn't count as a new edit). I didn't check the timeline but if the vote came within a few minutes of the post. that might have been the case. $\endgroup$
    – Glen_b Mod
    Commented Mar 28, 2017 at 22:11
  • $\begingroup$ I can see not downvoting because it would be a waste of time. Giving an upvote doesn't make sense to me. What would the OP be thinking even to post such a question? $\endgroup$
    – Michael R. Chernick
    Commented Apr 3, 2017 at 20:03

1 Answer 1

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As far, as I can verify, it was me who made the upvote. Out of fun and out of curiosity. I also thought it was inconsequential since the answer will get flagged and removed soon and since I would remove the upvote few minutes later anyway. I didn't care that the answer was just posted, nor did I know that there is a badge for upvotes.

I can't answer the general question, I would just suggest that there is a plethora of disconnected reasons why a gibberish answer may get a single upvote. In statistical terminology these would be considered measurement noise. To continue the analogy I suggest we avoid overfitting by closing this question :)

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