For purely technical questions, I'm not so sure about that anymore. Sure, the earlier replies tend to get more votes, but replies that are technically wrong do tend to much lower (to the point often of going negative) reputation. If I'm a beginner faced with a bunch of options, and don't have the time to try all of them, then focusing a few of the higher reputation options is a good strategy.

The best way to judge a node's content is to see if it works. Nothing will ever change that.

On an ideal world, that's true. On an ideal world, one would have all the time one needs to try out each and every reply to see which was best.

You can already order replies by reputation.

Until you mentioned it (and I went looking), I didn't know about this feature. I wonder if newbies will notice it.

On an ideal world, one would have all the time one needs to try out each and every reply to see which was best.

Why ask a question in a public forum if you're going to ignore some of the answers?

... the earlier replies tend to get more votes, but replies that are technically wrong do tend to much lower (to the point often of going negative) reputation.

If the strongest certainty you can offer as to the correlation of reputation with correctness is a tendency, what does showing the reputation of a node after a null vote give you that ordering by reputation doesn't?

Again, to see the reputation of replies, the questioner would have to cast a null vote on each reply. At low levels, he won't have enough votes in one day to vote on every node attached to many questions. With reply ordering, he doesn't have to spend any votes. Sure, he can only see a rough relationship of one reply to the other, but what does the fact that one reply has a reputation of 18 and another has a reputation of 12 explain?

You can't expand one bit of information (+1 or -1) to "technically correct" and "technically incorrect" because that bit has already been compressed from myriad reasons. "I don't like this node." "I don't like the poster." "I disagree, but it's a good thought." "My finger slipped." "I'm trying to use up my last vote." "The poster needs one point to go up a level." "I think he downvoted me elsewhere."

This proposal strikes me as trying to squeeze way too much meaning out of a number that's mostly meaningless already, especially when a solution already exists without the drawbacks.

I'm all for making reply ordering by reputation the default, though.

Why ask a question in a public forum if you're going to ignore some of the answers?

I prefer to phrase that question as:

If you ask a question in a public forum, and get lots of different answers, how to you decide which are worth pursuing with the limited time and resources that you have?

To my thinking, that mostly means eliminating replies that the community, which I have to assume has more experience (or I wouldn't be asking the question), has judged unworthy.

At low levels, he won't have enough votes in one day to vote on every node attached to many questions. With reply ordering, he doesn't have to spend any votes.

That's a good point. Perhaps reply ordering needs to be either better advertised, or made a useable on a case-by-case basis. The default order of earliest first (or last, but still ordered by time) makes it easy to spot new replies. Ordering by reputation is useful on less frequent occassions. Given the current setup, it's a real nuisance to temporarily view a thread by reputation.