in reply to Two Observations About Voting/Experience

The system is not broken. We could add levels, but nothing would change-- once you make friar the levels are all the same. We could add writeup requirements so that no matter how many XP you get you cannot be a saint without $some_number of write-ups. But what would that change? Unless exceptions were built-in it would negatively affect some monks (although I bet most of those affected wouldn't care one way or the other). The biggest problems we have are trolls-- and they could easily operate without even logging in-- and personality clashes.

The trolls are not a big problem-- it is much harder to deal with seemingly sincere newbies in a way that both corrects their behavior and encourages them to keep trying. The personality clashes are a problem inherent in any community-- and they will result in things like snide downvoting, grand announcements of departure, flame wars-- and unfortunately the only good way to solve personality clashes is to make the personalities sit in different corners for a while. Which is likely to alienate one or both of them and could prove to be a greater loss to the community than the friction itself.

That said, I applaud the idea of voting more on technical nodes and less on discussion and meditation nodes. And even if you can't or don't want to test code samples, if it looks right, is formatted well, shows intelligent variable names, and is the kind of code you'd like to inherit, vote it up!
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