I know this is the stated meaning, and I usually think it’s correct to act on. In some cases when usage deviates from this, though, I’m not actually sure that people are making a mistake.
I think that happens most often on short statements of opinion. In such cases, there’s not much ambiguity about how useful the comment was (opinions are always somewhat useful but don’t contain amazing new insights). It’s more useful to get a cheap instant poll of how widespread that opinion is in the community.
Notes:
I’m not confident in this, but to the extent that it seems wrong it would be if we thought posting short opinions was generally unhelpful. (I’d find that claim more plausible of LW, but still dubious there.) Otherwise to convey the information about distribution of opinions lots of people need to post.
Separate buttons as Benito suggests below might well be preferable. In particular they’d avoid ambiguity of things like the case in hand, which will be mostly read as an expression of opinion but also gives some considerations for.
This “instant poll” effect is to my mind the strongest reason for having voting scores on posts be public anyway. Maybe if there were separate buttons only the “agree/disagree” one would get displayed, and the “useful/not-useful” would be used to determine display-order for posts.
I was going to down-vote Ryan’s comment to express that I disagree ;) But then I noticed that it was unusually helpful that he’d raised the point explicitly as it made it easier to have this conversation, and didn’t know what to do.
The primary role of the vote buttons is to create the incentive gradient that determines which comments (and commenters) we get to have. This is perhaps the most powerful tool we have for incentivising some types of commentary. So I think we should practically always vote according to what comments we want to exist. On the margin, I think everyone (including you, based on your last bullet!) should vote more on usefulness.
I know this is the stated meaning, and I usually think it’s correct to act on. In some cases when usage deviates from this, though, I’m not actually sure that people are making a mistake.
I think that happens most often on short statements of opinion. In such cases, there’s not much ambiguity about how useful the comment was (opinions are always somewhat useful but don’t contain amazing new insights). It’s more useful to get a cheap instant poll of how widespread that opinion is in the community.
Notes:
I’m not confident in this, but to the extent that it seems wrong it would be if we thought posting short opinions was generally unhelpful. (I’d find that claim more plausible of LW, but still dubious there.) Otherwise to convey the information about distribution of opinions lots of people need to post.
Separate buttons as Benito suggests below might well be preferable. In particular they’d avoid ambiguity of things like the case in hand, which will be mostly read as an expression of opinion but also gives some considerations for.
This “instant poll” effect is to my mind the strongest reason for having voting scores on posts be public anyway. Maybe if there were separate buttons only the “agree/disagree” one would get displayed, and the “useful/not-useful” would be used to determine display-order for posts.
I was going to down-vote Ryan’s comment to express that I disagree ;) But then I noticed that it was unusually helpful that he’d raised the point explicitly as it made it easier to have this conversation, and didn’t know what to do.
The primary role of the vote buttons is to create the incentive gradient that determines which comments (and commenters) we get to have. This is perhaps the most powerful tool we have for incentivising some types of commentary. So I think we should practically always vote according to what comments we want to exist. On the margin, I think everyone (including you, based on your last bullet!) should vote more on usefulness.