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Questions tagged [free-votes]

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“Free Votes” is kind of vote that can serve as training wheels for users as they learn how to use votes on the platform. Free votes will not contribute to reputation; no post author will gain or lose rep because of a free vote received on one of their posts. However, free votes will still contribute to a post’s score because it does reflect a real user’s opinion of that content, which is a useful signal to others.

4 questions
Newest Active Unanswered Frequent
2 votes
0 answers
190 views

A few hours ago, I posted an answer on a question on the main site. That answer later got 2 upvotes, which is showing next to the answer itself (red text and drawings are my own): ... but observing ...
gthanop's user avatar
  • 3,561
65 votes
0 answers
744 views

Posting this as a dedicated feature request based on staff recommendation here. Please differentiate somehow between free votes and 'real' votes. Preferably, this would be visible when looking at the ...
TylerH's user avatar
  • 21.3k
5 votes
1 answer
215 views

My understanding is that the implementation of free votes is such that any of the effects of normal (privileged) up/down-votes will apply, unless the dev team explicitly changes the logic to make that ...
starball's user avatar
  • 61.4k
46 votes
16 answers
6k views

Update on October 16, 2025: The Free Votes Experiment has now graduated, allowing thousands more Stack Overflow users to contribute to the platform by voting on content. We get roughly 1,000 - 1,200 ...
Sasha's user avatar
  • 101