I've done this at times to a well-written argument that I disagree with. Could be just basic fairness, hoping to attract somebody to counter-argue, or possibly to help it rise above more poorly-reasoned arguments for the same thing, or even to make my own counter-argument post more visible.
Sometimes I do. If I don't, it's probably because I just don't have the time or energy to write a well-reasoned counter-argument at the moment. Or maybe because I don't know enough, and don't feel like doing the research to support what I think. Getting sucked into internet arguments at work or while working on my own projects is just terrible for productivity and focus.
> Sometimes I vote something up because I want to see a good counterargument in the replies. Should I not be doing this?
I usually will up vote something if I can't see an obvious reason why it was downvoted...I've seen too many downvotes for dogmatic reasons and don't really post much here because of this.
I've done this too. A thing to note is that complaining about downvotes or how you expect something you posted to be downvoted tends to attract downvotes. Kind of weird, but just the way voting forums tend to go.
you should vote however you think will foster good discussion, and that sounds like as good a reason as any. another would be voting based on how you think the posts should be ordered from best to worst, regardless of agreement with individual posts.
sure, voting can sometimes hinder discussions by collapsing the many dimensions of judgement and value into a single binary, with loads of information loss on the way, but indistinct pronouncements like that are exactly why mechanisms like voting are implemented in the first place, to weed out shallow submissions to give space to more considered ones.
downvoting is dimensionally-collapsed feedback and requires nuanced examination to internalize well. so it makes sense to self-examine a bit, then dampen the internalization to account for ambiguity (rather than quitting). that builds both flexibility and resiliency.
sometimes you get no feedback at all, which is even more ambiguous. feedback always exhibits degrees of ambiguity, so we gotta figure these things out at some point in life (well, we don't, but that's worse), and this is a great place to practice.
The problem is not with the upvotes, but with the downvotes. These have the effect of silencing any oppinions that the majority of voters don’t agree with (as the message gets invisible). This should only be used with low quality messages, otherwise the result is that there will only be a single line of thought, like a broken record.
