shmem bows politely. Retorting thanks.

The idea was as I stated in the OP. It's about protecting, in some measure, the overall "quality" and reputation of the site in the eyes of the wider world, by hiding from Anonymous Monk (which would include folks following hits from google, for example) the worst of the site's content.

I was referring to the introduction of this policy in the first place: whom are node tallies to be shown.

As for the overall "quality" and reputation of the site in the eyes of the wider world, the contents of this site speak for themselves, as does every node (speak for itself), and every monk does. This site doesn't need to boost its reputation in the eyes of a wider world - the reputation is in the eye of the beholder, in short: I don't care really, and I personally am against (tongue in cheek) shenanigans to boost PerlMonks acceptance: it wouldn't be a monastery any more ;-)

About free speech -

As others have said -- this isn't really true. If you want to make an argument along this line, you'd better attack reaping first.

No. There's no need to "attack reaping". The rules for reaping a node are well established: a node has to be considered, voted for reaping by a significant amount of insiders, and NodeReaper isn't sent to do his work by an algorithm, rather quite sensible folks do that afaik. SPAM and such aren't free speech, since they are no speech at all. We could start to argue what speech is and when, but that would prrobably go beyond the scope of PerlMonks.

Anyway, we as a community have a right to protect ourselves from the effects wrought by bad actors, and this proposal is an attempt to do so in the least intrusive and disruptive way.

Yes, and we did that - as a community - in the most friendly and peaceful way (exceptions prove the rule) as long as PerlMonks exists, and my argument is that we need not any further restrictions, except security for our site and fellow monks.

My argument is that there is no such thing as "effects wrought by bad actors" at this site, as long as "bad actors" and their utterings are visible, and their doings aren't carefully crafted psy-ops. But that is a whole other theme, which doesn't make sense on a technical site devoted to a computing language. As said, even bad advice is educational in my eyes.

There is a substantial difference between how logged-in users use the site, and how (we suppose) random drive-by visitors use the site. The present proposal is based on the presumption that the latter are mainly looking for good technical content.

Substantial difference based on supposition isn't far from prejudice, sorry. At least a very weak argument presented as is alone.

I'd say that random drive-by users use the site basically for the same purpose as regulars: seeking, and (Anonymous Monk probably to a lesser extent) providing technical content, since this site has little more to offer. The main difference between Anonymous Monk and regulars is that the latter are able to keep track of their doings for whatever purpose.

In this light, we would actually be doing them a service.

Not really. Absolute vote tally is dependant on overall interest on the topic, amongst other factors, so votes don't really say anything reliable about technical quality. If that were so, and if votes would be cast only dependant on technical merit, you'd probably be right. But there's no way to isolate technical from social stuff in each voter, let alone for the whole site. See the infamous Quantum Weirdness subthread.

Privacy is a whole different thing I want to add, just in case

Okayyy... What is your point?

Point is "just in case". It is generally not a good idea to add more data than needed to a public discussion. I added this only to prevent this discussion from trailing off into something else. *Sigh*.

When's the last time you saw a reply to a very low-quality note contain matter of worthy technical merit? It's very rare.

Agreed, and I vaguely remember occasions, but I won't dig into that. But since your proposal is about an automatism without human interaction, I thought that this possibility is worth mentioning. Imagine somebody posting the ultimate solution for world peace based on pure perl, seven hawks downvote that, and then it is shunned from all but regular monkses.

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