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Community: Why do people add questions to their favorites without voting them up?

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    Many times, I've asked a question, and when checking back for an answer, I've found that the question has no votes but one "favorite star". Is this the community user's doing, or is it perhaps related to people who lurk but don't have sufficient reputation to vote? Do some active users "favorite without voting up"? Really, I'm just curious because it seems like a strange thing to do.

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    I think some people use favorites as bookmarks.

    • CommentAuthorCam McLeman
    • CommentTimeSep 17th 2010 edited
     
    Agreed. I think I've done this on occasion, if I think the question isn't particularly well-phrased but might be edited into a great question, or may elicit great responses despite its ill-formedness. Or if I just want a reminder to come back to it later and think about it more carefully.
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    I think that, actually, the website design actively promotes the use of favourites as bookmarks, by asking people to do two essentially very similar things: "voting up" and "marking as favourite". In this day and age, it would seem very strange having to tick two different boxes to say just one thing. Hence, I personally put a star to questions I would like to return to later and, possibly, answer, and vote up the ones that tickled my sense of aesthetics.

    Of course, there is also the small matter of Internet Explorer that always refers to "bookmarks" as "favourites".
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    On math.SE I use favorites to mark questions that I don't have time to answer now but would like to get back to later. That's not as much an issue on MO (either I can answer a question immediately, which is very rare, or not at all), but maybe others do the same.

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    Lurkers without enough rep? And what are they doing reading meta, anyway?

    As a lurker without enough rep to vote (or comment, I have a dear 11 points), I feel obligated to respond to your inquiry. I have been using the 'favorites' feature to store questions that I find interesting. Specifically, if I think a question is basic to a topic that I am interested in then I will bookmark it in order to gather unique references in that topic. I also like to bookmark soft questions that are obviously related to my academic trajectory, as well. (trajectory: First year grad student - aiming for academia.)

    And what am I doing reading meta, anyway? I propose the analogy to the little kid sitting on the stairs listening to the adults discuss politics late into the evening... This is the kid who will question his Social Studies textbook when he gets to high school. (It's an attempt to gather that elusive thing called perspective. Caveat: Not everything that happens here is interesting, so I frequently just go back upstairs and play in my room.)

    • CommentAuthorShevek
    • CommentTimeSep 20th 2010
     
    Sometimes I might favourite an item because it seems like a question I would like to investigate further at a later date; at the instant I first see the question I won't necessarily have the time to read through it carefully nor the expertise to judge its quality. I probably should make sure I vote up such questions, because "looks interesting to me" should be sufficient for a vote.

    Another reason why someone might favourite an item but not vote on it is that they may just generally not care too much about the whole voting system and reputation and all that jazz... I'm a bit like that myself... pretty apathetic about it. But of course I do realize that we should vote up good questions so that lame ones drop down in comparison and get buried.
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    Vote early, vote often, and also vote for your dead relatives.

    • CommentAuthorShevek
    • CommentTimeSep 20th 2010
     
    Yeah, I'll get on that. Especially now that I've been seeing quite a few dodgy super-basic or undergrad-homework questions surfacing. If only there were a virus that could be injected into the population of such questions sitting around in the Platonic realm of ideals in order to wipe them out before they are born in an inappropriate-questioner's brain.... A man can dream...
    • CommentAuthorbbischof
    • CommentTimeSep 23rd 2010
     

    Another possibility is that your getting one upvote and one downvote, however I assume you are attentive enough to your rep to notice that.

    • CommentAuthorMike Jones
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2010
     
    Whoa. From the above discussion it is clear that “favo(u)rite” does not necessarily mean “favo(u)rite”. However, in the PERSONAL NAMES discussion I got raked over the coals for pointing out this phenomenon.

    I hope Willie Wong sees this.

    Rather obnoxious of me to point it out again, though, so I hope jbl doesn’t see this.
  12.  

    Go away.

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