johngg and moritz Advocate finding an existing node to ++ This is a good solution (that I didn't think of... duh!), and may end up being what I adopt.

It should be stressed that as good a solution as it is, one should be sure not to pick randomly a node from the given author, but explore a few of them and find the one that most deserves your upvote. Of course in the process of doing so it may turn out that they are all precious to you and you may want to upvote several of them. You can view this is a means to discover interesting nodes @ PM too.

One strategy is to look at the most upvoted nodes from an author, since they're likely to be good.

Another strategy is to look at the most downvoted ones, because they may simply be controversial or misunderstood. Or the author may have just slipped on a detail. I for one once used carelessly and naively the word "racism" without thinking of the psychological impact of it and thus conveying a distorted idea about the real meaning of my own post - planetscape kindly retitled it for me to avoid further --'s leakage.

Other times a good node is buried too deep into a thread to gain enough visibility and gets one or two downvotes out of ad hominem downvoting or some inexplicable reason. Spending your vote to correct the situation is not that bad. (Of course you wouldn't know if the reputation was negative until you vote it, but you can judge for yourself its value.)

Voting on a monk's home node, for a possible "most useful home nodes" link is an interesting idea, but wasn't my original intention. Nice suggestion johnlawrence!

Count me for one half-hearted about the possibility of voting home nodes, which ideally I cherish, except for the -- vote which anyway should be there for consistency. Perhaps home nodes could just not gain negative overall XP, or a care should be taken about abuses. But who really wants to be a home node anti abuse cop?!? Instead I'm sure I'd allow replying to home nodes: this was once possible but has been disabled since it was discovered to be. Someone still has a home thread!

A thank you doesn't (necessarily) imply access to an inverse function, and fits in more with what my original thinking was. I would envision a simple thanks button on the home node, that each user is allowed to hit, say, once per day per homenode (and it uses a vote). Perhaps there is also a 35-Character (or so) text box that can describe what the thanks is for (this could be abused with sarcasm though).

This has come out before, e.g. in a discussion I started myself. I for one would like lightweight "thanks" nodes, but many see in this the risk of deviating from the KISS paradigm, let alone that someone should implement the beast! ;)