As a very new user, I’m not sure if it’s still helpful to add a data point if user testing’s already been done, but it seems at worst mostly harmless.
I saw the mod note before I started using the votes on this post. My first idea was to Google the feature, but that returned nothing relevant (while writing this post, I did find results immediately through site search). I was confused for a short while trying to place the axes & imagine where I’d vote in opposite directions. But after a little bit of practice looking at comments, it started making sense.
I’ve read a couple comments on this article that I agree with, where it seems very meaningful for me to downvote them (I interpret the downvote’s meaning when both axes are on as low quality, low importance, should be read less often).
I relatively easily find posts I want to upvote on karma. But for posts that I upvote, I’m typically much less confident about voting on agreement than for other posts (as a new user, it’s harder to assess the specific points made in high quality posts). Posts where I’m not confident voting on agreement correlate with posts I’m not confident I can reply to without lowering the level of debate.
Unfortunately, the further the specific points that are made are from my comfort/knowledge zone, the less I become able to tell nonsense from sophistication. It seems bad if my karma vote density centers on somewhat-good posts at the exclusion of very good and very bad posts. This makes me err on the side of upvoting posts I don’t truly understand. I think that should be robust, since new user votes seem to carry less weight and I expect overrated nonsense to be corrected quickly, but it still seems suboptimal.
It’s also unclear to me whether agreement-voting factors in the sorting order. I predict it doesn’t, and I would want to change how I vote if it did. Overall, I don’t have a good sense of how much value I get out of seeing both axes, but on this post I do like voting with both. It feels a little nicer, though I don’t have a strong preference.
As a very new user, I’m not sure if it’s still helpful to add a data point if user testing’s already been done, but it seems at worst mostly harmless.
I saw the mod note before I started using the votes on this post. My first idea was to Google the feature, but that returned nothing relevant (while writing this post, I did find results immediately through site search). I was confused for a short while trying to place the axes & imagine where I’d vote in opposite directions. But after a little bit of practice looking at comments, it started making sense.
I’ve read a couple comments on this article that I agree with, where it seems very meaningful for me to downvote them (I interpret the downvote’s meaning when both axes are on as low quality, low importance, should be read less often).
I relatively easily find posts I want to upvote on karma. But for posts that I upvote, I’m typically much less confident about voting on agreement than for other posts (as a new user, it’s harder to assess the specific points made in high quality posts).
Posts where I’m not confident voting on agreement correlate with posts I’m not confident I can reply to without lowering the level of debate.
Unfortunately, the further the specific points that are made are from my comfort/knowledge zone, the less I become able to tell nonsense from sophistication.
It seems bad if my karma vote density centers on somewhat-good posts at the exclusion of very good and very bad posts. This makes me err on the side of upvoting posts I don’t truly understand. I think that should be robust, since new user votes seem to carry less weight and I expect overrated nonsense to be corrected quickly, but it still seems suboptimal.
It’s also unclear to me whether agreement-voting factors in the sorting order. I predict it doesn’t, and I would want to change how I vote if it did.
Overall, I don’t have a good sense of how much value I get out of seeing both axes, but on this post I do like voting with both. It feels a little nicer, though I don’t have a strong preference.