(tilly)

But you cannot choose to vote both unaccountably and controversially.

er. um. ew. I am not sure i can explain how icky i find this; and the list of reasons is long. Now i can't downvote even a troll unless i am prepared to type in an explanation of why i think it's a troll. and what counts as valid? can i send a blank message as my explanation? or do i have to say "this node is bad"? maybe you want a 4-paragraph essay on the grammatical, algorithmic, and emotional problems i detected in the writing? i think most of the time the explanations would be too long to write or too short to help. i think agonizing over whether or not i'll be challenged will keep me from downvoting nodes worthy of being downvoted; and what's worse, i think fear of having to explain why i liked an unpopular node will keep me from voting up nodes that deserve it. i think a lot of people have raised a lot of good points, and i'm not sure you've answered all of them, though i'll have to re-read this whole conversation to assimilate it all.

i replied to petdance's post because i like this idea; it's what they used to do at Red Meat Construction, and similar to what they still do; basically, comments are optional and can be anonymous but are often signed. we could even make the signing unfakable (or rather, such that it always signs the username if there is a sig) via a checkbox rather than in the text. i think this would do everything that the accountability would do, and actually not make life unlivable.

the other compromise i thought of was that the challenge be added to the "consider" options in nodes to consider. that way, if the higher level monks feel a node's rep is not representative of its value, they can make that call. (and i do mean higher level; this is probably something only a saint can ask for, but not limited to his own nodes.)

over all, however, i think my attitude is that votes should remain anonymous, and people should just take it easy. after all, XP just gets you more votes, and votes just generate XP. all in all the sum total is nothing; voting is just for fun. if you don't like the system, don't use it. there's nothing that says you can't post just because you don't vote.

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slight tangent: sometimes i think there should be a section for "suggestions" where rep votes cannot count against your XP, where the voting "context" is agree or disagree, especially for nodes like this. my instinct is to vote against this node (though i won't, i'll vote for it) because i don't want the thing it proposes to be made reality, and i feel like there should be a numeric way to express this. this would be different from other areas of perlmonks because you would be voting up or down the *idea* not the *node*: suggestions with high positive response would be more likely to be implemented than those without. but i think it's clear that suggesting something people don't want should not cause you to lose XP. i also think tha tthere, you should be able to change your vote if argument sways your opinion.

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