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?
Back when I could downvote, I voted down a bit over 1/3 of the comments I read, voted up about 1/10, and consciously left neutral the rest. I tried to read every comment. These days, I usually don't bother.
no - I think the author of something is important context for understanding it, and I don't really see the point of the 'boo-vote'. And I usually browse in Chrome.
no threshold.
Everything about a post is a potential influence on my voting. Writing style is probably the biggest determinant for whether something gets up or down voted.
I try to keep my subconscious in the basement with my superego, soul, and Cartesian theater.
Bad posts get downvoted. Good ones get upvoted.
I almost never make comments saying how I voted and why, as this is almost always off-topic.
yes to all of the above, except 'reward' and 'agree/disagree'. Mostly to nudge the comment up/down.
no limit on downvotes. Also, showing number of up/downvotes, rather than a flat total.
If I reply to a comment, I don't downvote it - if it was worth downvoting, then it's not worth a reply. If a comment inspires a discussion, that's evidence it should be upvoted.
I don't think I have a reaction to that.
A rough characterization of my comment-voting procedure (when I had downvotes):
-downvote if blatantly off-topic, nonsensical, or otherwise really bad (cf. Lojban)
-otherwise, upvote if underrated (a fine comment with a negative score)
-otherwise, upvote if the comment represents an unpopular (here) view that is expressed well
-otherwise, downvote if the comment doesn't add anything to the discussion
-otherwise, upvote if the comment is extremely well-written, along with a good argument, link, or citation.
-otherwise, upvote if the comment is passably good and led to an excellent discussion
-otherwise, downvote if the comment is terribly overrated (not good comment with more than 10 points), especially if it seems to merely state something people here agree with.
-otherwise, strongly consider a downvote and see if it seems like the right thing to do.
-otherwise, leave neutral.
Is it explained somewhere why you can no longer downvote?