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Voting: Best Practices
I've seen some discussion of what voting should be used for here on tildes.
Here are the things I try to follow when voting on comment:
- Does it have a reputable looking source ( I open the source and check it out)?
- Does it have new information?
- Is this a comment whose votes are acting as a form of population polling?
- Does it contain a well thought out point/ multiple paragraphs?
Here are the things I try to follow when voting on a post:
- Is it important for other people to see?
- Is it reputable?
- Does it contribute to the greater tildes dialogue?
I try to make sure it takes more than one of these for me to vote on a comment or page but that certainly isn't always the case. The one thing I try to stay away from is from voting just because I liked the title or because I agreed with an easy 1-3 sentence opinion unless I think that opinion is really important.
Unlike on reddit I vote for most comments, it feels like it matters more. It's basically just a way of encouraging or discouraging behaviour.
It upsets me to see comments that ask a question and generate a lot of discussion and useful child comments with high votes by doing so, while it sits on 1 or 2 votes.
While I personally like your criteria, I don't believe there will be buy-in for "official" or generally accepted criteria to upvote.
Honestly, it's early, and I'm not sure there'll ever be a community standard for what uni-dimensional voting means, beyond individual criteria such as those you've stated.
There's been a great deal of meta about tags, other selections such as "interesting", "informative", etc. along the lines of Slashdot, or other forms of indication beyond "I approve this post".
Even informative posts don't necessarily generate commentary, and I don't think it's a good idea to rank on what generates the most comments. Promoting inflammatory content/commentary over informative content/commentary is an avoidable trap for Tildes.
Here are my criteria:
Comment: Does it contribute to discussion in a manner consistent with what I see as the ideals of the community
Post: Is it a topic that that I find interesting or has the potential to generate interesting discussion.
While I don't disagree with your list at all, and I implore you to keep using it, I think there's a chance you're over-thinking this. I personally just vote with my gut. The urge to vote makes its way from my lizard brain to my fingers without much detailed thought, and I think the same goes for most users. While we're obviously trying to create a higher standard of community than most of the internet, trying to micromanage how people vote is a bit of an impossible task. We can have the discussion, by all means, but at the end of the day most people are just going to vote with their gut.
Unless it's a neo nazi post or a troll or my fingers are tired, I generally upvote everything I see.