I was not trolling - so I'll try to clarify a bit my point. What I see here is that new users think that the XP points have some arbitrary value - that they are in fact indicator of the experience of the user. That is the reason they improve their posts to maximalize the XP gain. But the generall stance in the community here is that XP means nothing. So generally they exchange their valuable time to improve their posts for nothing. This is not fair.

Recently I have been reading online about the so called 'Gift Economies'. This is the model of relationship that should be applicable for most onlie communities (and for the community of scietific research too). What I found is that in most cases the 'Gift Economy' is in fact still all about exchange, but the exchage is not between individual humans but between a member of the community and the community as a whole. The value the community is giving back to the member is his reputation. This is quite natural for people to interpret XP as a measure of this kind of reputation.

The machiavellian part is in that you have people do the good things for a false reason. It works because they either stay at PM for enough time to learn about the true nature of reputation or they go away and don't disturb the working of The Monastery.

In reply to Re: Re^6: A case for neutral votes (+/-) by zby
in thread A case for neutral votes by dws

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.