What you mention here is why I disagree with the fact that you can up OR downvote here without
commenting. A comment should be required before you can upvote or downvote. All for similar reasons
you raise here.
"in case it's not clear, this would be a control for moderation, posting it as a comment for non-moderators to view would be optional."
Agree, useful/helpful, disagree, not relevant, spam, illegal, inflammatory, etc...
Then you can apply different weights to different votes and maybe even allow people to sort by the different values. Even some "dark" UI patterns might work well like completely ignoring some values (like disagree) and leave them there as a way for some to express that without having it change anything.
I haven't given much thought to the details, but it seems like this could help on the surface.
I feel like a major problem would be getting people to actually vote. It's already hard enough IMO and I frequently forget to vote on comments which I very much enjoyed and we're very relevant (like your own until this moment), and needing to have many options to choose from and possibly multiple steps would make that bar even higher which means less votes overall. Also getting across the meaning of what each vote really is meant to represent would be tough as well...
Now limit the number of times I can vote within a given time period, and you've reinvented Slashdot.
Encourage people to vote as many ways as possible, as many times as possible, as much as possible.
Check off not-relevant, agree, inflammatory. Or maybe disagree and relevant.
No limits, maybe some weighting, but no limits.
Just because some of the ideas have been done before doesn't mean it's just a reinvention.
Here's the magic of the Slashdot system: not everyone has all day to click voting buttons, but some people do. So what you'll end up with your proposition is voting dominated by people that make a career out of hanging out on one web forum, with the conversation consequentially dominated by them.
The Slashdot system is more like jury duty: go in, do your civic duty by casting your five or ten votes, then go on about your day. I don't want a justice system dominated by people with nothing better to do than sit on juries every day.
I feel making the voting process easier by creative UX would help, and then weighting can take care of the rest. If a power user votes 100X more than the average, have their votes count 100X less, or some kind of other method to weight them back into normalcy and keep the system from becoming a "most active dictates what the platform is" kind of thing.
Slashdot sets lower and upper bounds on comment scores and lets readers set a threshold. Promoting good posts has more impact than demoting bad ones, so you'd probably just ignore all but the worst off-topic posts.
Making someone's votes count less would strongly discourage voting more often.
But the nice part is you can control how you approach this weighting.
Perhaps every days votes is normalized to 10. So if I only voted once it counts 10x, but if I voted 100 times each would count .1x.
There are tons of ways to implement it so the feeling of uselessness doesn't apply, after all, qt the end of the day we are pretty gullible bags of meat.
That might not be a bad thing. I'm just saying it works against your goal of getting people to vote as many times as possible.
You owe it to yourself to at least study Slashdot's system before putting too much thought into creative UX, dark patterns, and complex weighting. It isn't the last word in comment scoring, but as someone else pointed out, you could probably fill a book with all the lessons that shaped it.
Willingness to converse is the prinary metric; upvotes fuck with that by also pushing the orthogonal metric of how much people like the post itself (regardless of how worthy of response it is).
And ofc, you're trying to tack on like 6 more orthogonal metrics. But whats wrong with letting people vote with their feet?
Not to mention that it encourages controversial content as it generates more arguing (read discussion).
It's just not a system that I believe works well, especially with threaded content like on HN or Reddit.
You're completely ignored, but only in the sense that people skim your post... since the posts all live on the same plane, the comment must still be skimmed over (in order of time). But its not the system, or some subset of users ignoring you (by hiding your post automatically, by downvotes or a lack of upvotes)... it's the users choosing, individually, to ignore you.
And AFAICT, upvote-based systems have a higher tendency to post bullshit, in the form of trivially community-acceptable statements, or simple nonsense like "I agree".
However, I'm also of the opinion that most interesting comments on both types of systems are arguements and refutations (by knowledgeable people), info dumps (by knowledgeable people), or histories (by experienced people).
The latter two are supported by upvotes, but the goal of upvotes is to utterly extinguish the former.
Whereas I believe a downvote function should at least encourage a user to explain why. Otherwise it's impossible to know whether the downvoter believed the comment was inflammatory, offensive, off-topic, or plain just incorrect, which one would assume would be a call to explain as to why it was incorrect...
I suppose it could be argued that in that situation a comment explaining a downvote (that you agree with) would already exist, and that an upvote on that comment would serve a similar purpose to downvoting the comment it disagrees with.
There are plenty of times I disagree with a comment that don't deserve a response, however. Less frequent here on HN, but trolls trolling within the rules (to preclude moderation-based solutions) are an easy example of something that'd actually be better to downvote without a comment.
It absolutely could be, no sarcasm, but it would somehow have to be detached from "this comment is good/bad and should be promoted/demoted". "I agree/disagree" and "I think should be promoted/demoted" are certainly going to be correlated for as long as you are dealing with humans, but hard-wiring that correlation to 1.000 right in the design of the system is not going to produce good results. There is a reason all the successful upvote/downvote sites at least have a culture of explaining to people that the votes are not for agreement, even if it breaks down after a certain scale.
And I've never seen a successful two-dimensional moderating scale. (I've been keeping my eye out, and I'd invite anyone who could show me one to reply and tell me about it, please.) Slashdot came closest with what was about a 1.2 dimensional system where you could upvote/downvote with a set list of one-word reasons, but there was still no "-1 Insightful" or "+1 Contrarian Opinion You Need To Hear" or anything. (Capping at +5 also limited things.)
Can you give an example in what situation this could be useful? When you disagree, there are many ways to disagree. If you just want to drive-by disagree, without making a proper argument, then perhaps it would be better (for everybody) if you just didn't engage at all, and let other people deal with the situation.
Think about who you're doing the moderation for: other people. It's your job, as a moderator, to explain and educate well-intentioned people that you disagree with why do you disagree with them, or what do you perceive to be wrong with their comments. Then, as an added bonus, community can judge also your moderation criteria, by moderating on your counterargument or explanation.
> There are plenty of times I disagree with a comment that don't deserve a response, however.
For obvious trolls, there should be flagging and eventual deletion.
Update: Actually, it could be useful to "disagree but have nothing to add" when you already agree with some of the responses. So, IMHO, the rule should be, you can downvote a comment only if you either (a) added a response or (b) upvoted an existing response.
I also say this while happily wearing my Readertron t-shirt. He's right - the conversations we had on Reader were very, very good.
some forums I frequent added various like/dislike/sad/funny counters just to get rid of the noise of hundreds of contentless like posts.