As a new monk I have been noticing some trends in voting that I'm intrigued by. The two points of interest are, that I seem to be receiving more votes on my posts that were less about perl and more about socializing; and that the difference between the votes I get for the strictly Perl posts and the others is so noticeable. I am keeping in mind that because I have very few votes my result set to sample from is very small but I've also seen similar trends in other peoples posts. As of this posting here are my current stats:
Looking at this table a person would see that the code snippet I posted, "Email web page daily" received half the votes of "Re: Freedom in the rearview mirror". While the original post from f_tte was a good post (and I personally voted ++ for it) I didn't think my comment was so valuable that it warranted 18 reputation points. Especially when the code I posted only received 9. Just so I'm not misunderstood by no means do I think the snippet was great code and deserved more votes, what I'm trying to say is I would rather have 1 vote on the snippet and 0 votes on the comments that don't really contribute anything useful to the community. While pleasantries shouldn't be discouraged I don't personally feel they warrant praise from the group. On the other hand as I said I'm relatively new to the community and I would like to hear from the members whose works have made this place into what it was when I arrived.