I'm sad to say it, but as of late I am losing my faith in the voting system here in the Monastery. It could just be that I have a different viewpoint on what votes should be used for, and it could also be that this is something that has been ongoing for a long time and I've finally noticed it.

I think there is a general set of criteria that should be met before voting ++ on a node. Does the node:

There are also guidelines I follow for down-voting. Is the node:

OK, so what's my problem? It looks like people generally follow a similar set of rules for up-voting good nodes, and that makes me happy. However, there seems to be a proliferation of up-voting just for the sake of up-voting. For instance, the first reply to many SoPW posts--no matter its quality--gets many positive votes. For recent examples, please see Object creation, How to disable buffering ?, and chomp it chomp it good (I know these are all from the same authors, and I apologize for that, but I didn't want to spend the time looking for others).

If you look at Re: chomp it chomp it good, you'll see a reply that in no way answers the question. The OP already knows that you don't need to pass a reference to chomp, but wants to know how it can magically alter the contents of the values passed to it. I think that this node deserves to be down-voted. I don't even think it should be in the thread at all. However, at this time it has a positive vote of 5, with 14 positives and 9 negatives. How is it that there are only 9 people that think that node really doesn't belong? And more importantly, who are this 14 people that thought the node was so spectacular?

And then there is Re: How to turn off buffering ?. Currently standing with a reputation of 30. How is it possible that 30 people (and probably more than 30, since I didn't vote on this node and only know the net) thought this node worthy of an up-vote? It doesn't answer the question and is really just confusing. It then goes on to point to the Suffering from Buffering node, which doesn't offer any insight on the OP's issue.

So what's going on with the voting system? Why are such poor and irrelevant nodes getting such a high reputation? It appears to be that down-voting is a taboo subject around here, but I really think that that mentality takes away from the true value of the voting system.

Ok I'm out.

</rant>

In reply to Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good by lostjimmy

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