There has been a considerable amount of discussion scattered around Less Wrong about voting, what software features having to do with voting should be added or subtracted, what purpose voting should serve, etc. It seems as though it would be useful to have conveniently consolidated information on how people are actually voting, so we know what habits that we want to encourage or discourage are actually in use and how prevalently.
1. About what percentage of comments do you vote on at all? What percentage of top-level posts?
2. Do you use the boo vote or the anti-kibitzer extensions? Why or why not?
3. What karma threshold do you use to filter what you see, if any?
4. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, what features of the post are you occurrently conscious of that influence your decision either way? (Submitter, current post score, length, style, topic, spelling, whatever.) What about comments?
5. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, are there any features of the post that you suspect you may react to subconsciously? What about comments?
6. When you vote on a post, or read it and decide not to vote on it, how do the features to which you react influence you? What about comments?
7. Do you make comments saying how you voted and why, on posts or on other comments? Why or why not?
8. What do you think a vote should be for? (Moving comments around in attentionspace, signifying agreement or disagreement, nudging the score in the direction of the score you think it deserves, influencing user karma to reflect general trends of post/comment quality, pointing out comments that are entertaining or useful or have cogent reasoning, compensating for other people upvoting or downvoting something you don't think warrants it, rewarding people for completing surveys, something I didn't think of, some combination of purposes). Do you usually vote in a way consistent with your opinion about its purpose?
9. What software features would you like to see that are relevant to voting?
10. Does your replying behavior interact in any interesting way with your voting behavior? (For instance, do you usually reply to comments you find confusing with questions, and then downvote them only after getting an inadequate explanation? Do you vote only on discussions you have, or haven't, participated in? Do you upvote for agreement and reply for disagreement?)
11. How do you tend to react when one of your posts or comments gets a good karma score? What if no one votes on it, or it gets a negative score?
12. Is there anything else about your voting behavior or opinions on voting that might be interesting?
1. Not many. Wild guess: 1 to 5% of comments, 5 to 15% of top-level posts.
2. No. Too complicated. Not too complicated to understand and use, but too complicated to be worth bothering with. Besides, I don't use Firefox.
3. No threshold, I see everything. At first, because I wanted to see for myself what sort of thing would sink to the bottom of the barrel before ignoring it, and thereafter because there's very little that's ignore-worthy, and it's not worth (see (2)) looking through the preferences to find the knob to tweak.
4. Content and presentation. Does it contain new ideas? Retreads of the past? Good arguments or bad? Has the writer Done Something, or just obsessed on empty puzzles? Is reading it like walking into an elegantly furnished Palladian villa to the tinkling of harpsichords, or a dark and cluttered attic? Do I feel smarter or stupider for having read it?
5. Agreeing with the writer could be a factor. I try not to let it be.
I may be less inclined to upvote the top people, on the grounds that "Of course it's brilliant, it's by [whoever]! But does it excel, compared with their usual?" I'm undecided whether that should be a consideration.
6. Not sure what the difference is with question (4).
7. I never comment on how or why I voted in any individual case. If I have something specific to say in reply, I'll say it. Voting serves a different purpose.
8. Keeping participants on their toes. This is a test, and you are being marked on it. Like life, but you get to see your score.
9. Can't think of anything. I wouldn't like to see more complicated voting. +/0/- is enough for me.
10. If I'm moved to reply to a comment, then unless I'm just scolding a troll, it was worth at least enough to me to not downvote it.
11. Up: "I iz da man!!" Down: "O noes! I wuz WRONG on teh intarwebz!!" Then I get over that and look at the actual replies.
12. I'm still in the process of deciding how and when to vote. At the moment I only vote up or down when I'm particularly struck by a posting's worth or worthlessness.
I vote up much more often than I vote down.
I prefer to decide my vote on a post or comment before reading any of the replies.