Should we volunteer to test 1-reputation voting?

Question

What is this about?

You may have noticed the Meta post in the sidebar: If more users could vote, would they engage more? Testing 1 reputation voting on some sites.

In brief, Stack Exchange is looking for sites to participate in a test, wherein:

• Everybody can vote, i.e., the reputation required for both up- and downvoting would be lowered to 1.
• There is no reputation cost for downvoting answers.
• Registering your account is still required for voting.

The desired effect is that this increases user engagement and recruiting. The concerns are that this increases vote fraud and low-quality votes.

This question

Should we volunteer to participate in this test? Since this is a simple yes/no decision, please indicate your agreement by voting on this question: upvote for yes; downvote for no.

Post any arguments or concerns you might have as an answer. I will do so as well.

A note to visitors

This question is about whether the proposed changes or participating in this test is beneficial for this site, not to SE in general or any other site. If you want to discuss the latter, please take it to Meta SE.

Answer 1

I am for this because I think it’s likely beneficial for our particular site:

Why Graphic Design of all sites?

The proposed changes have their clear up- and downsides and which weigh more depends on the specific site. I expect that Graphics Design is strongly on the benefitting side (and by far amongst the sites I am familiar with), for the following reasons:

• We have a clear shortage of new, engaged users and lowering the entry is likely to recruit some.
• We are short on votes, which reduces the reward for engaged users, both new and old.
• We do not have controversial content. For example, people invading our site to support or quench some opinion expressed in an answer is unlikely to happen.
• By the nature of our topic, we get a lot of drive-by users who might want to upvote posts that were truly helpful but cannot due to the reputation threshold.
• We have a low incidence of vote fraud and similar issues that this change may exacerbate.

By contrast, I would argue Academia SE (another site I moderate) does not tick any of these boxes and implementing 1-rep voting would be a clearly bad idea.

Isn’t volunteering to be a guinea pig risky?

There is no denying that there is some risk involved since we are exploring unchartered waters here. However, I do think that this risk is manageable and worth it. In short, I statistically expect the outcome to be positive.

In particular, I am not for this because I think some site should test it or that it’s better us than some other site. I am for this because I think that participating in the test itself is a good choice for us, even if we take into account the risks.