Re: Please read nodes carefully before replying

Let's also be honest with ourselves. There is a bit of karma/XP whoring going on in certain threads. Consider that it is a joked about condition of the community and it's advancement structure.

Because of that way the voting system rewards you for actually voting and the fact that the first post(that looks technically correct) will most likely get the most votes when people are trying to spend all their daily vote allotments, you can see that some participants may RACE to post their thoughts without reading an entire post just to be first. I've seen posts that were completely off-topic and I've even seen posts that were completely struck-through with comments like, "didn't read entire post".

Now I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I bring this up because I notice no one else has mentioned it thus far and I think it does play a role in some of the inaccurate responses out there. But one should keep in mind that it's the rabid participation that drives this community and makes it 100 times better than any similar place on the internet. And honestly, haven't all of us done this once or twice in our participation here?

Let he who is without sin...

Comment on Re: Please read nodes carefully before replying

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Re: Re: Please read nodes carefully before replying by bobn (Chaplain) on Jul 22, 2003 at 04:35 UTC
Which could be partially addressed by taking most or all of the XP gain out of voting. I often see multiple posts from someone, decide based on them that he is clueless, then go to his user info only to find that his experience level exceeds mine, for far fewer posts. This is not to say I'm a genius of some sort - I've had some very clue-challenged moments myself - but rewarding voting so heavily is definitely distorting things. I'll admit to having posted faster than is good to try and get a few votes. I'm not sure of the cure for that, other than self-discipline and humility, both of which I lack. --Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com	[reply]
Re^3: Please read nodes carefully before replying by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Aug 24, 2003 at 15:49 UTC
The problem is not with the XP system so much as with value you assign to it. XP is in no way a rating of expertise, knowledge or anything else of any consequence. It is, mostly, a measure of how much a user has contributed to this site - and voting certainly is contribution. Besides, I don't know if you realize how little XP the "heavily rewarded" voting really gains you. Even a saint, who gets 40 votes a day, can at best gain 10XP/day from spending all his votes consistently. 10XP is nothing. Three short stock replies to simple beginner questions on SoPW will easily get you as much if they're even barely correct. Makeshifts last the longest.	[reply]