Strong-vote etiquette: Strong-voting every time; always strong-voting one's own comments; ...
Why is there vote strength in the first place? I.e. why is LW not egalitarian in this regard? What was the motivation for adding vote strength? -> IIRC part of the reason was to prevent periods of high new user growth from swamping the site and culture.
Speaking just for myself, and not suggesting this as a norm:
Checking my vote history, stats based on my last 6 weeks of voting: I ~never strong-upvote my own comments (whereas one's own posts are strong-upvoted by default). I very rarely strong-vote comments (on the order of <1-2%) one way or another. I rarely agree-vote one way or another. I occasionally (5-25%) strong-upvote posts, with meanings like "more people should see this" or "I want to see more stuff like this". Especially posts like LW feature announcements, practical high-effort posts, etc. I strong-downvoted one single post in this timeframe, on a hot-button politics issue.
One confounder here is that when I browse the LW feed, I tend to bookmark posts and then only read them months later. So by the time I read such a post, all the comments already have plents of votes, and the karma order usually looks more or less fine to me, so I see little point in bothering with using strong-upvotes. Similarly, by that time truly unpalatable low-value comments are usually already at negative karma, so again, no reason for me to pile on.
One situation where I do "make use of my voting power" is when voting on norms in the LW/EA communities. E.g. I often strong-vote and (dis)agree-vote during community controversies. Fortunately there either weren't any in the past six weeks (so this behavior didn't appear in the stats above), or there were and I didn't see them.
I don't really understand the site's software enough to give a good explanation, but seeing the code that (at one point?) governs/governed this was helpful to me when someone linked it previously: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/devel/packages/lesswrong/lib/voting/voteTypes.ts
Maybe worth adding:
I've remarked that I've recently begin to strong upvote more and I think it's a bad habit. How often would you say you upvote vs strong upvote?
Speaking just for myself, and not suggesting this as a norm:
Checking my vote history, stats based on my last 6 weeks of voting: I ~never strong-upvote my own comments (whereas one's own posts are strong-upvoted by default). I very rarely strong-vote comments (on the order of <1-2%) one way or another. I rarely agree-vote one way or another. I occasionally (5-25%) strong-upvote posts, with meanings like "more people should see this" or "I want to see more stuff like this". Especially posts like LW feature announcements, practical high-effort posts, etc. I strong-downvoted one single post in this timeframe, on a hot-button politics issue.
One confounder here is that when I browse the LW feed, I tend to bookmark posts and then only read them months later. So by the time I read such a post, all the comments already have plents of votes, and the karma order usually looks more or less fine to me, so I see little point in bothering with using strong-upvotes. Similarly, by that time truly unpalatable low-value comments are usually already at negative karma, so again, no reason for me to pile on.
One situation where I do "make use of my voting power" is when voting on norms in the LW/EA communities. E.g. I often strong-vote and (dis)agree-vote during community controversies. Fortunately there either weren't any in the past six weeks (so this behavior didn't appear in the stats above), or there were and I didn't see them.