I've asked before what's best to upvote here on Hacker News:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065084

I'm always happy to hear advice on how to upvote better, to make the discussion here more informative and interesting and to make the community here more civil and thoughtful.

I disagree. I think about up votes in terms of their impact.

I upvote if I think something is worth talking about, or deserves the attention of the greater community. Because that's what it literally translates into -- raising the position of a post on the front page.

What would be interesting is to have two buttons -- one to raise awareness, and a second button labeled "me too" to indicate agreement. Maybe have it where both can be clicked by the same user, or where only one or the other can be selected. Not sure which would be better.

Does I need to know if you agree outside of you wanting to raise awareness? If you want to comment sure :) but that metric means what outside of raising awareness.

Raising awareness affects the comment / article position, whereas the agreement button changes the points value.

I think Slashdot was one of the few to get it right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot#Slash_and_peer_moderat...

Honestly, I think slashdot's is too complex.

It dissuades too many people from taking a position via messy ui.