If you think a post was an important intellectual contribution, you can cast a vote indicating roughly how important it was. A vote of 1 means “it was good.” A vote of 4 means “it was quite important”, and is weighted 4x a vote of 1. A vote of 9x means it was a crucial piece of intellectual progress.
What do the negative votes mean, exactly?
Negative votes are for conveying you think a post is some combination of misleading, harmful or unimportant.
(Also, FYI each vote has a hoverover tooltip)
Thanks! (Somehow my brain just glossed over the tooltips, even though I had to have seen them spawn to click on the votes…)
(… also, why the heck would anyone downvote my comment?!)