ikdind said:
I thought about this, but if the point is to maximize utility, minimize friction, and minimize the scope of a change, I felt favorites were a better model to start from for the following reasons:

• Anyone who would "upvote" an ambiguous quality post already thinks it is of sufficient quality to approve, why not just approve it?

• Is a "Score"-like widget sufficiently informative? It gives a difference between ups and downs, but we probably care more about the total number of votes.

• It might be important to know who has voted. Although the site nominally trusts all the janitors with approval powers, surely there are janitors who are viewed as more authoritative by other janitors. And by the time a "Favorited by"-style name list would get truncated, there are enough votes against the post that the exact people to have voted probably doesn't matter anymore.

• My understanding is that some folks do prefer to work from the search page. How easy is it to extend the different search page modes for an upvote/downvote-style system? "Add to favorites" and "remove from favorites" are already modes available to normal users, but not "upvote" and "downvote", so it may be more work to expose a clone of voting than a clone of favoriting.