I self-identify as using the first one, with a caveat.
The second is obviously awful for communicating any sort of information given that only the sum of votes is displayed rather than total up and total down. The second is order dependent and often means you’ll want to change your vote later based purely on what others think of the post.
My “strategy” is to vote up and down based on whether I’d have wanted others with more insight than me to vote to bring my attention to or away from a comment, unless I feel I have special insight, in which case it’s based on whether I want to bring others’ attention to or away from a comment.
This is because I see the goal of the voting process that readers’ independent opinions on how much a comment is worth readers’ attention be aggregated and used to bring readers’ attention to or away from a comment. As a side effect, the author of a comment can use the aggregated score to determine whether her readers felt the comment was worth their collective attention.
Furthermore since each reader’s input comes in distinct chunks of exactly −1, 0, or +1, it’s wildly unlikely that voting very often results in the best aggregation: instead I leave a comment alone unless I feel it was(is) significantly worth or not worth my(your) attention.
The caveat: there is a selection effect in which comments I vote on, since my attention will be drawn away from comments with very negative karma. There is also undoubtedly an unconscious bias away from voting up a comment with very high karma: since I perceive the goal to be to shift attention, once a comment has very high karma I know it’s going to attract attention so my upvote is in fact worth fewer attention-shift units. But I haven’t yet consciously noticed that kick in until about +10 or so.
I self-identify as using the first one, with a caveat.
The second is obviously awful for communicating any sort of information given that only the sum of votes is displayed rather than total up and total down. The second is order dependent and often means you’ll want to change your vote later based purely on what others think of the post.
My “strategy” is to vote up and down based on whether I’d have wanted others with more insight than me to vote to bring my attention to or away from a comment, unless I feel I have special insight, in which case it’s based on whether I want to bring others’ attention to or away from a comment.
This is because I see the goal of the voting process that readers’ independent opinions on how much a comment is worth readers’ attention be aggregated and used to bring readers’ attention to or away from a comment. As a side effect, the author of a comment can use the aggregated score to determine whether her readers felt the comment was worth their collective attention.
Furthermore since each reader’s input comes in distinct chunks of exactly −1, 0, or +1, it’s wildly unlikely that voting very often results in the best aggregation: instead I leave a comment alone unless I feel it was(is) significantly worth or not worth my(your) attention.
The caveat: there is a selection effect in which comments I vote on, since my attention will be drawn away from comments with very negative karma. There is also undoubtedly an unconscious bias away from voting up a comment with very high karma: since I perceive the goal to be to shift attention, once a comment has very high karma I know it’s going to attract attention so my upvote is in fact worth fewer attention-shift units. But I haven’t yet consciously noticed that kick in until about +10 or so.