in reply to Re: Re: A case for neutral votes
in thread A case for neutral votes

It gives people meaningless information in the guise of useful information.

I don't agree that a node's reputation is completely meaningless. In the context of someone who has asked a question near the edge of their abilities and who now must sort through N disparate suggestions, the ability to discover that N/4 (or even 1) of those suggestions has been deemed to be wrong is very helpful. Ordering by reputation (but without seeing reputation) doesn't give you that. You can't distinguish between the end of the list still being a good suggestion, and it being deemed nonsense.

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Re: Re: Re: Re: A case for neutral votes
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Aug 10, 2003 at 00:29 UTC

    Again, a node's reputation has, at best, a tangential relationship to its correctness.

    Again, I don't see how knowing that one reply has a reputation of 12 and the other has a reputation of 2 means anything. Too many other factors affect node reputation: time of day, day of week, tone of post, logged-in users, whether a node is on the front page, whether a node is in Newest Nodes, along with features that are even harder to measure.

    This proposal is trying to put weight on a foundation that won't hold.

    I've replied to dozens of incorrect posts that had positive reputations. The best way to mark a node as incorrect is to reply with a correction, not to downvote it and hope that the original poster sees the reply before attempting to take the advice of the incorrect node, that the original poster casts enough null votes to rank the reputations of these nodes in relationship to each other in a meaningful way, or that the original poster has reputation ordering enabled.