Polls are useful because they can show gradient and can also be detached from the main message of a post. I put a poll in every thread I create (haven't made one in a long time) because I like to see why people are voting. I might have a poll with the following options, for example:
- I agree, CMs could be good
- I disagree, CMs would be bad
- Thread wasn't interesting
- TLDR
This lets me see whether people are voting because of agreement, or because they don't feel it's worth their time. Something interesting with polls, by the way, is that they generally have more activity than the votes. Even in this thread's poll, you have 2 people that agree with you and 3 that don't. Why is the vote total not 0?
Voting would only show an amalgamation of yes/no, it doesn't show any of the reasoning for voting a certain way. I am also pretty biased against up/down voting as the sole metric, because voting encompasses a lot of factors. It becomes a choice where a user has to weigh factors against each other to select a vote, and it's just easier not to bother. Here are some of the factors:
- Degree of agreement
- Assessment of quality
- Assessment of tone
- Consideration of comment position/attention
- Conversation value
For example, let's say someone makes a post that is really aggressive and poorly written but I heavily agree with the overall message the user is trying to convey. I have determined that I agree strongly with the comment, my assessment is that it's very low quality and has very poor tone, I don't particularly want it to receive attention, and it doesn't really have conversation value. Do I upvote it, downvote it, or just let it lie?
