I rarely upvote articles, even if they're generally interesting to me (front page or /newest). Because upvoting also functions as a saving mechanism on your userpage, I only upvote things I want to save (mostly on a certain topic). If there were some distinction between upvoting and saving, I might be more liberal in upvoting interesting stories.
Right now, upvoting conflates at least three (relatively) distinct intents:
- "save for later"
- "looks interesting"
- "did read; was interesting; would recommend"
It's the same w/ many other services, e.g. Twitter's stars. It would be rather interesting to see whether a service offering finer-grained options would add much in terms of actual usefulness.
I'm curious if a lot of other users do the same. I rarely (if ever) look at my saved list and probably therefore end up upvoting a lot more than you (or others) do.
