you think in people's desire to add more points to something they like that isn't funny, they'll use the funny vote to promote it more?

Yes. It's a system based on trust, and I think sooner or later untrustworthy people will start using Saidit.

On the one hand that's kind of also laughing at content they're trying to seriously promote, so I don't know if people would do that.

I think people will game the system to get the desired result. Ever seen a twitter message starting with "1/5"? Why would they do that when the platform clearly is made for 280 characters?

Plus anyone truly dedicated to gaming the vote system can just switch between multiple accounts, so I'm not sure how much it's actually preventing in reality.

It prevents normal users from gaming the system in a situation where there is no limits and no clear rules. Using VPNs, using profiles/private and creating a ton of sock puppets is a clear circumvention of the system and the threshold for doing this is significantly higher.

We put a lot of work in to coding the functionality of being able to vote both. It'd be a real shame to undo all that, plus it's one of the unique features to saidit.

Very understandable. My suggestion doesn't change that in any way but forces a clearer divide between insightful and funny.

And by the way, all your hard work is greatly appreciated and I hope that you all consider my bitching as my way of contributing to a site I believe can achieve greatness if you don't make the same mistakes as similar sites or make brand new mistakes.

What if insightful is +2, funny +1, but then if you vote both it's still just +2 total, but it gives +1 to the insightful category and +1 to the funny category?

That is a good idea that stops the boosting and keeps your design goals. I have a suggestion that handles both while it will probably increase the knowledge and use of the funny vote:

AFAIK right now "Hot" is a combination of insight/funny votes while "Funny" sorts the post based on their funny rank only. There is no way of sorting it on "Insightful" only.

Why don't we have "Funny", "Insightful" and "Hot" (which sorts by the cumulative score from both votes) sorting tabs? It will make it easier to sort by preferred content and encourage people to vote funny as funny (re: the three people finding a comedy video "insightful").

For a balance in the "Hot" (Cumulative scores), funny posts would have to be valued the same as insightful posts (1 or 2 points for both). But this would prevent a problem I think will arise as soon as people actually start to use the votes as intended...

With the current system all explicitly funny posts will be gone from the front page due to the points weight and relegated to the "funny" tab/frontpage. A post with 11 insightful votes will overtake a funny post with 15 votes and this will make funny posts an afterthought since they very rarely will hit the front page.

I believe this will very well encompass your design goals to:

This way it doesn't give additional points, but still gives the diversity of indication of being able to vote multiple ways. That way it doesn't encourage voting funny for visibility, but the complexity of the voting system is still maintained.

But even if you only consider the "max 2 points per post" change I'm happy. Thanks boss.