What accounts for the difference in reception between these questions?

Question

Following up on How do we handle questions with general commonality but some locally-specific details? I think it is also worth asking:

What accounts for the difference in reception between these locally dependent questions:

• Risks of giving friend-clients a discount: price discrimination?

• What should be on an invoice?

The first was significantly upvoted despite the fact that they are incredibly locally dependent in answering (moreso than the third actually) and initially included no locality information (unless I missed it). The third proved much more controversial.

Is there a consistent standard we can apply to all such questions regarding upvoting or downvoting?

Answer 1

Users decide themselves how to upvote and downvote. It is an individual's prerogative. Quite simply, "good" questions get upvoted, and not so good questions get downvoted. There is no "consistent standard" because everybody gets to vote as they see fit. So I don't think these questions were necessarily up- or down-voted based on the location-dependence angle.

Here's what I can see different between the two questions, from a quality perspective:

1. The first question strikes me as unusual and intriguing. That is, when I first saw it, I thought "Gee, I had never thought about that problem." And that made it an interesting question. I upvote questions that strike me as interesting. This question also shows some thought has been put into it, with solutions and tradeoffs considered. This question is more constructive: here's a problem I'm having, and here's what I've tried or thought about.

2. Whereas, the second question seems to be a generic question that can be looked up elsewhere. This must already be documented in at least ten other easy-to-find places on the internet. Those aren't very interesting questions. Google yields easy results. Moreover, the poster hasn't provided any evidence that they've researched this issue, and has just left it wide open. This question is less constructive.

FWIW, I had upvoted the first question (it was interesting) and downvoted the second (it was generic, non-constructive, and missing required location information.)

That's my CAD 0.02.