I’m slightly wary of it because it pushes against the “LW is a place you can talk about ideas, as much as possible without having social status play into it”, but like it or not “High Profile User liked my comment”, or “My Friend liked my comment” is way more motivating.
As a contrary data point, I prefer LW to Facebook because the identified voting makes the social part of my brain nervous. I’m much more hesitant both to “like” things (for fear of signaling the wrong thing) and also to post/comment (if a post/comment lacks identified likes, that seems to hurt more than lack of anonymous upvotes, while the presence of identified likes don’t seem to be much more rewarding than anonymous upvotes for me).
ETA: If LW implemented optional identified voting (which I’ll call “like”), I’d probably use it very sparingly, because 1) I’m afraid I might “like” something that turns out to be wrong and 2) I feel like if I did use it regularly, then when I don’t “like” something that people can reasonably predict me to endorse they would wonder why I didn’t “like” it. So I’ll probably end up “liking” something only when it seems really important to put my name behind something, but at that point I might as well just write a comment.
The above updates me toward being more uncertain about whether it’s a good idea to add an ‘optional non-anonymized upvoting’ feature. I’ll note that separating out ‘I agree with this’ from ‘I want to see more comments like this’ is potentially extra valuable (maybe even necessary) for a healthy non-anonymized upvoting system, because it’s more important to distinguish those things if your name’s on the line. Also, non-anonymized ‘I factually disagree with this’ is a lot more useful than non-anonymized ‘I want to see fewer comments/posts like this’.
As a contrary data point, I prefer LW to Facebook because the identified voting makes the social part of my brain nervous. I’m much more hesitant both to “like” things (for fear of signaling the wrong thing) and also to post/comment (if a post/comment lacks identified likes, that seems to hurt more than lack of anonymous upvotes, while the presence of identified likes don’t seem to be much more rewarding than anonymous upvotes for me).
ETA: If LW implemented optional identified voting (which I’ll call “like”), I’d probably use it very sparingly, because 1) I’m afraid I might “like” something that turns out to be wrong and 2) I feel like if I did use it regularly, then when I don’t “like” something that people can reasonably predict me to endorse they would wonder why I didn’t “like” it. So I’ll probably end up “liking” something only when it seems really important to put my name behind something, but at that point I might as well just write a comment.
The above updates me toward being more uncertain about whether it’s a good idea to add an ‘optional non-anonymized upvoting’ feature. I’ll note that separating out ‘I agree with this’ from ‘I want to see more comments like this’ is potentially extra valuable (maybe even necessary) for a healthy non-anonymized upvoting system, because it’s more important to distinguish those things if your name’s on the line. Also, non-anonymized ‘I factually disagree with this’ is a lot more useful than non-anonymized ‘I want to see fewer comments/posts like this’.