The strength of your votes on LessWrong depends on your karma; if you have more karma, your upvotes will increase the score of things you upvote by more.
Normal votes (one click) are worth
2 points – if you have 1,000 karma
1 point – if you have 0 karma
Strong Votes (click and hold) are worth
16 points (maximum) – if you have 500,000 karma
15 points – 250,000
14 points – 175,000
13 points – 100,000
12 points – 75,000
11 points – 50,000
10 points – 25,000
9 points – 10,000
8 points – 5,000
7 points – 2,500
6 points – 1,000
5 points – 500
4 points – 250
3 points – 100
2 points – 10
1 point – 0
I don’t really understand the site’s software enough to give a good explanation, but seeing the code that (at one point?) governs/governed this was helpful to me when someone linked it previously: https://github.com/ForumMagnum/ForumMagnum/blob/devel/packages/lesswrong/lib/voting/voteTypes.ts
Maybe worth adding:
Strong-vote etiquette: Strong-voting every time; always strong-voting one’s own comments; …
Why is there vote strength in the first place? I.e. why is LW not egalitarian in this regard? What was the motivation for adding vote strength? → IIRC part of the reason was to prevent periods of high new user growth from swamping the site and culture.
I’ve remarked that I’ve recently begin to strong upvote more and I think it’s a bad habit. How often would you say you upvote vs strong upvote?
Speaking just for myself, and not suggesting this as a norm:
Checking my vote history, stats based on my last 6 weeks of voting: I ~never strong-upvote my own comments (whereas one’s own posts are strong-upvoted by default). I very rarely strong-vote comments (on the order of <1-2%) one way or another. I rarely agree-vote one way or another. I occasionally (5-25%) strong-upvote posts, with meanings like “more people should see this” or “I want to see more stuff like this”. Especially posts like LW feature announcements, practical high-effort posts, etc. I strong-downvoted one single post in this timeframe, on a hot-button politics issue.
One confounder here is that when I browse the LW feed, I tend to bookmark posts and then only read them months later. So by the time I read such a post, all the comments already have plents of votes, and the karma order usually looks more or less fine to me, so I see little point in bothering with using strong-upvotes. Similarly, by that time truly unpalatable low-value comments are usually already at negative karma, so again, no reason for me to pile on.
One situation where I do “make use of my voting power” is when voting on norms in the LW/EA communities. E.g. I often strong-vote and (dis)agree-vote during community controversies. Fortunately there either weren’t any in the past six weeks (so this behavior didn’t appear in the stats above), or there were and I didn’t see them.