Free votes are a new kind of vote, introduced as part of an experiment, that can serve as training wheels for users as they learn how to use votes on the platform, before they have earned enough reputation to vote normally (15 rep for upvoting and 125 rep for downvoting).
We are trying out this new type of voting to improve the experience on Stack Overflow for the tens of thousands of users every month who try to vote but can’t, which can be a frustrating and confusing introduction to the platform. There is onboarding built into the experience, to educate users about what these votes are and how they can use them, through timely modals and nudges to guide next steps.
How many votes can I cast?
Each user given access to free votes will get to cast up to 5 per week. Users with under 15 rep will be able to use these as up or down votes. Users with between 15 and 124 rep already have the ability to upvote normally, so they will be able to use their free votes as downvotes.
If you’ve cast all your free votes in a given week, check back on Sunday of the following week, when your free votes refresh.
Why can’t I use my free vote to downvote an answer?
Users included in the free votes experiment cannot cast downvotes on an answer unless they have a reputation higher than 1, because downvoting an answer costs 1 reputation point (to discourage targeted or abusive downvoting).
Do free votes impact reputation?
Free votes do not grant rep to post authors. Read more here about how free votes work with rep.
Why can’t I cast free votes?
Free votes are being slowly rolled out in phases to users who lack enough rep to vote normally. This allows us to collect feedback on the experiment and catch technical issues before the feature is made available to all eligible users.
How can I get unlimited voting privileges?
Start earning reputation! In the future we may look into giving full voting privileges to users who have yet to meet the reputation thresholds, once we can determine that they are consistently using free votes in an appropriate manner, but there is no process for this yet.
How are we preventing misuse of free votes?
As users start utilizing their free votes, Stack Overflow staff will monitor voting patterns within the experiment daily to check for indicators of suspicious voting, or anything that violates the Inauthentic Usage Policy. If we find problematic voting patterns, we will remove access to free votes for offending users and reverse the ones they have already cast.
Was this experiment announced on Meta Stack Overflow?
Yes, you can read more in this post: Stack Overflow Experiment: Safely expanding voting access