Down-voting is explicitly discouraged by the system; there are warnings and XP penalties if you do much of it. So it's no surprise that people get the message that -- is bad, and start preferring ++ instead.

While I share your pain at the low quality of some contributions, I fear it's inevitable, regardless of the voting system. From what I've seen on other forums, people would probably jump in with poorly-thought-out, borderline-irrelevant replies even if they weren't going to get any XP out of it. Some people just go for "high scores" instinctively, and if they can't get XP, they'll go for high post counts or "first posts" instead -- and that's arguably even worse!

In reply to Re: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good by Porculus
in thread Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good by lostjimmy

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.