I'd trade in my ability to vote to see the votes. ;-) One could prevent a "herd" mentality by starting off with no votes displayed to a post, but giving readers the option to view the number of votes cast. Once you select that option, you no longer are able to vote for that post.

(And now we'll get people saying that they are happy with the system as it is, and I shouldn't demand vroom to change the site. And that I'm a heritic for even wanting to change the site. Well, read again. I'm not suggesting anything should be done. I'm just pointing out what could be done.)

Abigail

A neat trick is to change your user settings so that postings are sorted by "Best First" instead of "Chronological". This way you can vote on a few and at least have an idea how the rest rank. If a post is between one that has a repuatation of 16 and one with 5, you at least have an idea.

This way, when downvoting, I tend to go a little easier on those that sort last.

Actually, I love the idea - a perfect solution to the me-too-voting problem.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I agree with Abigail-II in regards to being able to see the 'rep' of a post before voting - it would help me in separating the wheat from the chaff. My problem (and I imagine a problem for most of us lower-skilled monks) is that I can't tell the difference between a well-written but ultimately incorrect post and one that is just as well-written but accurate (at least not without a lot of time and effort which can't always be spared).

For example, for the node How to structure applications using a RDBMS, there are many well-written answers. They all might be valid (after all, TIMTOWTDI), but some will obviously be better (read: more elegant|perlish) than others. How is a newbie supposed to know? My solution has been to vote for all the ones that make some sense and then check their 'reps'. It isn't the best solution, since older posts have had the chance to get more votes that the newer ones, but it's a starting point.

In a perfect world I would study all the answers and once I understood them I would choose the one that best fit the problem. However, I don't have the time (nor, to some extent - the ability) to do this. That is why I rely on my fellow monks, just as I rely on the six Perl books on my desk.

As an aside, I find it interesting that I can see the 'rep' of a post if I go to Best Nodes or Worst Nodes, but not when I go to Newest Nodes.

Update: While writing this, I saw tadman's suggestion. Cool, yet another part of PerlMonks that I need to learn about...

Pat

It will not help you:
• I've seen incorrect answers to get higher reputation than correct just because they was looking "more correct".
• First posts have better chances to get high reputation than later posts.

In short: do not rely on reputation of nodes too much. Usually good nodes have higher probability to get high reputation but that's all.

--
Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)

I would like to see the XP of the person making the post, not the reputation of the post itself.

As to the static titles on posts. Sounds reasonable but I get the feeling that would take a great effort to change that.

It would be next to impossible to make that retroactive. The XP of a poster is not stored in the database. But it can be implemented for future posts. I guess it's just a matter of finding out if this is a good enough idea.

oakbox