I think it should increase your trust in the voting system! Most of the rest of the internet has voting dominated by whatever new users show up whenever a thing gets popular, and this makes it extremely hard to interpret votes in different contexts. E.g. on Reddit the most upvoted things in most subreddits actually often don’t have that much to do with the subreddit, they are just the thins that blew up to the frontpage and so got a ton of people voting on it. Weighted voting helps a lot in creating some stability in voting and making things less internet-popularity weighted (it also does some other good things, and has some additional costs, but this is I think one of the biggest ones).
I think this already happens in the EA Forum, where controversial topics like the Bostrom email seemed to encourage mind-killed tribe voting. Sometimes similarly reasonable arguments would get either heavily voted up or down. And I am now not confident whether any scores on controversial opinions here reflect the average opinion of many people or just a few unrestrained strong voters who skew the visible picture in their favor. The problem here is that it leads to an escalation. The more you suspect that others abuse their strong votes, the more it becomes rational for you to do likewise.
But it also incentivices users to abuse their strong votes.
For what it’s worth, I have 10 strong upvote strength and at least when talking about comments, for me the effect is the opposite. With the karma of most comments being in the 0-10 range, an upvote of 10 feels so huge that I use it much more rarely than if it was something smaller like 4. (For posts, 10 points isn’t necessarily that much so there I’m more inclined to use it.)
I considered for a while to add a medium-like voting-system where you can just click n-times to give n votes until your maximum vote strength, but the UI ended up too complicated. Might be worth revisiting sometime again though.
Data point: in practice I’ve given fewer strong votes as my vote power has increased and will very rarely use strong votes on comments where it would dramatically change the comment karma (or posts, but most posts get enough karma I feel fine strong voting)
I also have not used them since my voting power increased, simply because unduly exaggerating my voice is unethical. But once sufficiently many other people do it, or are suspected of doing it, this inhibition would go away.
The users of the forum have collectively granted you a more powerful voice through our votes over the years. While there are ways you could use it unethically, using it as intended is a good thing.
I think it should increase your trust in the voting system! Most of the rest of the internet has voting dominated by whatever new users show up whenever a thing gets popular, and this makes it extremely hard to interpret votes in different contexts. E.g. on Reddit the most upvoted things in most subreddits actually often don’t have that much to do with the subreddit, they are just the thins that blew up to the frontpage and so got a ton of people voting on it. Weighted voting helps a lot in creating some stability in voting and making things less internet-popularity weighted (it also does some other good things, and has some additional costs, but this is I think one of the biggest ones).
It is not clear to me whether it helps with the cases you mention. It gives more voting power to senior or heavy users. But it also incentivizes users to abuse their strong votes. This is similar to how score or range voting systems encourage voters to exaggerate the strength of their preferences and to give extreme value votes as often as possible.
I think this already happens in the EA Forum, where controversial topics like the Bostrom email seemed to encourage mind-killed tribe voting. Sometimes similarly reasonable arguments would get either heavily voted up or down. And I am now not confident whether any scores on controversial opinions here reflect the average opinion of many people or just a few unrestrained strong voters who skew the visible picture in their favor. The problem here is that it leads to an escalation. The more you suspect that others abuse their strong votes, the more it becomes rational for you to do likewise.
For what it’s worth, I have 10 strong upvote strength and at least when talking about comments, for me the effect is the opposite. With the karma of most comments being in the 0-10 range, an upvote of 10 feels so huge that I use it much more rarely than if it was something smaller like 4. (For posts, 10 points isn’t necessarily that much so there I’m more inclined to use it.)
Yeah, if I could medium-vote I’d give out a lot of those.
I considered for a while to add a medium-like voting-system where you can just click n-times to give n votes until your maximum vote strength, but the UI ended up too complicated. Might be worth revisiting sometime again though.
Data point: in practice I’ve given fewer strong votes as my vote power has increased and will very rarely use strong votes on comments where it would dramatically change the comment karma (or posts, but most posts get enough karma I feel fine strong voting)
I also have not used them since my voting power increased, simply because unduly exaggerating my voice is unethical. But once sufficiently many other people do it, or are suspected of doing it, this inhibition would go away.
The users of the forum have collectively granted you a more powerful voice through our votes over the years. While there are ways you could use it unethically, using it as intended is a good thing.