Every time this comes up, I like it less. I now think it is indeed a bad idea. It gives people meaningless information in the guise of useful information.

The purpose of voting is for individuals to say "this node is of helpful to the community" and "this node is harmful to the community". You can't even count on that, in all cases.

For a node's reputation to have any meaning as a number, you'd need several other statistics: the number of people who voted null on it, the number of people who viewed it, the number of people who had votes that could be spent on it, the number of positive votes, and the number of negative votes.

You'd also likely need people to provide some sort of reason why they voted one way or another. We've had that discussion before, several times.

I'd really like to see an example where knowing a node's reputation would have been useful. I apologize in advance for not counting "'cuz I'm curious!" as a useful reason.

(As a side note, one of the biggest mistakes I've ever seen in reputation systems was on Slashdot, by making karma public. My rule is, "Any moderation system that causes conversations to degenerate into discussions about the moderation system is broken." Omphaloskepsis is the death rattle of a community.)

In reply to Re: Re: A case for neutral votes by chromatic
in thread A case for neutral votes by dws

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