The problem now is that some people use upvotes to indicate agreement, while others use it to indicate helpfulness (and many, I suspect, use it interchangeably). Having two types of votes clearly separates these two signals. A vote to the right would mean agree, a vote to the left would be disagree. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a sidevote, anothey symbol might be better, but it’s the idea of two types of votes that counts.
Downside: people are unfamiliar with it, and may be complex to implement. Further complicates the dynamics of upvotes that other people have mentioned in this comment section. However, I think it’s fairly straightforward and people will easily pick up on it. Because it won’t be confused with other systems (I don’t know other fora with multiple types of votes), people will easily read the mouse-over text to find out what the votes mean.
Speculative feature request: side votes
The problem now is that some people use upvotes to indicate agreement, while others use it to indicate helpfulness (and many, I suspect, use it interchangeably). Having two types of votes clearly separates these two signals. A vote to the right would mean agree, a vote to the left would be disagree. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a sidevote, anothey symbol might be better, but it’s the idea of two types of votes that counts.
Downside: people are unfamiliar with it, and may be complex to implement. Further complicates the dynamics of upvotes that other people have mentioned in this comment section. However, I think it’s fairly straightforward and people will easily pick up on it. Because it won’t be confused with other systems (I don’t know other fora with multiple types of votes), people will easily read the mouse-over text to find out what the votes mean.