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Another way to address that would be to focus on more important need of users having reputation between 1 and 125. This problem is somewhat similar and can be technically addressed using essentially same the code that you already made for "thanks" feature.

Another way to address that would be to focus on more important need of users having reputation between 1 and 125. This problem is somewhat similar and can be technically addressed using essentially the same code that you already made for "thanks" feature.

Another way to address that would be to focus on more important need of users having reputation between 1 and 125. This problem is somewhat similar and can be technically addressed using essentially same the code that you already made for "thanks" feature.

Having association bonus you probably won't notice part of this issue because it allows you vote up everywhere but you can easily see the other part at sites where you have insufficient reputation to vote down.

Imagine that you visit some question that you have already seen in the past (simply visited it, or bookmarked or followed). Imagine that in the past visit you already spent some effort, evaluated the question and answers and decided for yourself which are useful and which are not.

Unfortunately, because insufficient reputation didn't let you vote up and down, when you see it again, there is no way for you to tell how you evaluated it before so you have to repeat cumbersome reading and checking things to find it out.

If system somehow recorded your past evaluation and displayed it to you this would save you quite a bit of effort, wouldn't it.

FWIW "thanks" feature currently partially aids in that because users with reputation between 1 and 15 can (mis)use it to record positive evaluation. But since the experiment had so thoroughly failed it will likely be removed so that problem described above will get back to us again.

This information wouldn't really need to be publicly visible in the post, because you evaluated things for yourself, not for others - merely listing it in Votes and reactions tab in your profile would perfectly suffice to serve the user need (though tab would likely have to be renamed to something like "votes and evaluations" to prevent misleading users about its purpose).

Incidentally, getting rid of showing it publicly would also remove possibility of abuse.

I think that the way how it is currently expected to be implemented makes a wide open door for abuse.

Proposed design makes it possible for anyone to create hundred sock puppet accounts and immediately cast "likes" in any quantities they want. And this kind of violation would be much harder to catch than voting-fraud. And even if caught, what are you going to do? Suspend the (1-rep) abuser? Ha, they will just create next hundred of sock puppets and keep doing what they did.

Be prepared to observe totally weird things like poor quality / spammy answers (including, but not limited to, all kinds of rants and senseless jokes) sitting at -10 score and having thousand likes.

Heck, be prepared to observe this even without any abuse, from legitimate "thankers" (which will be even more painful because there will be no way for you to stop that, no reason to suspend them and undo the damage).

You know, even upvotes from 15-rep users may be harmful (give a read to Atwood's Trouble With Popularity if you haven't yet). And now you are going to multiply this risk by 10,000.

The idea to reduce useless "thanks" in comments looks tempting and in theory I could support tricks helping in that. However, the price we have to pay for getting it the way you suggest seems too high.

You know, my primary reason for visiting Stack Overflow (explained eg here) is to learn from properly (cu)rated content, and thinking about how post quality rating may get totally skewed... it just makes me sad. Very sad.

Consider implementing this in a way that carries less risk of damaging content rating. One thing that comes to mind is to somehow limit visibility of these "likes", for example, showing them only to those who cast the like and to the post author.

Another thing I would strongly recommend to have is public visibility of likes in user profiles and (especially!) in Data Explorer. This way you could leverage power of broad site community to discover and fight potential abuse.

In order to minimize impact of possible abuse, I would additionally recommend that user deletion would make all of their likes disappear - immediately and unconditionally. For the same purpose, consider implementing "likes invalidation" tooling similar to one that is currently used for invalidation of fraudulent votes.

I think that the way how it is currently expected to be implemented creates a wide open door for abuse.

The proposed design makes it possible for anyone to create a hundred sock puppet accounts and immediately cast "likes" in any quantities they want. And this kind of violation would be much harder to catch than voting-fraud. And even if caught, what are you going to do? Suspend the (1-rep) abuser? Ha, they will just create the next hundred of sock puppets and keep doing what they did.

Be prepared to observe totally weird things like poor quality / spammy answers (including, but not limited to, all kinds of rants and senseless jokes) sitting at -10 score and having thousand likes.

Heck, be prepared to observe this even without any abuse, from legitimate "thankers" (which will be even more painful because there will be no way for you to stop that. There isn't any reason to suspend them and undo the damage).

You know, even upvotes from 15-rep users may be harmful (give a read to Atwood's Trouble With Popularity if you haven't yet). And now you are going to multiply this risk by 10,000.

The idea to reduce useless "thanks" in comments looks tempting and in theory I could support tricks helping in that. However, the price we have to pay for getting it the way you suggest seems too high.

You know, my primary reason for visiting Stack Overflow (explained eg here) is to learn from properly (cu)rated content, and thinking about how post quality rating may get totally skewed... it just makes me sad. Very sad.

Consider implementing this in a way that carries less risk of damaging content rating. One thing that comes to mind is to somehow limit visibility of these "likes", for example, showing them only to those who cast the like and to the post author.

Another thing I would strongly recommend to have is public visibility of likes in user profiles and (especially!) in Data Explorer. This way you could leverage power of broad site community to discover and fight potential abuse.

In order to minimize impact of possible abuse, I would additionally recommend that user deletion would make all of their likes disappear - immediately and unconditionally. For the same purpose, consider implementing "likes invalidation" tooling similar to one that is currently used for invalidation of fraudulent votes.