in reply to Front-paging and XP

spurperl,
While I don't disagree with the fact that a front paged node tends to attract more votes (either positive or negative), there are some reasons you haven't mentioned.

  • Nodes on the Monastery Gates stay "at the top" longer. Human nature leans towards the lazy side. Just as nodes at the bottom of a thread tend to have less XP that are just as good as the first reply - people stop reading.
  • Nodes that attract attention perform a snowball effect. If you get a debate going between more than one respectable monk on a node (anywhere not just the front page) it is going to get votes for spurning the debate that most likely will benefit the Monastery as a whole.

    And in reference to this node that you do not feel is deserving of the votes - I suggest reading this reply by hv. The monk found what appears to be a bug in certain versions of Perl. I was able to reproduce it on my Active State Perl, but I got the required error on my Unix machine.

    You are to expect a wide range of nodes frontpaged. This is because in the Perl community, we have users of all levels. It could be that a newbie with only 5 votes is casting them on a trivial front page node for a couple of reasons - s/he can understand them and they are right in front of their face (they don't have to go looking for them).

    As far as hurting the credibility of our XP system - I didn't it was in the first place. It seems to me that everyone with high XP trivializes it. The voting system (reputation not XP) is what is used to give a basic idea as to what is good and what is bad. A node that has a lot of negative reputation will be considered for deletion - and hence removed from the site - making it better. A node with high reputation such as Erudil's 1st Monasterians may be integrated into the Monastery itself.

    In summation - I agree that nodes on the front page recieve more votes (positive and negative) than they would if they were not front paged, but I don't see why that is a big deal.

    Cheers - L~R

    • In Section Perl Monks Discussion