question what the added value of participating is, if that participating means the game has degenerated to something meaningless.

I understand your frustration, and I know of at least one monk that does vote dump for XP and contributes nothing except the occasional response to a poll. As with any semi-complex community incentivizing contribution has its problems but, if done right the positives outweigh the negatives.

The advantages of incentivizing voting contribution:

• (obviously) Increased voting - which on a whole will show what the community values.
• Includes lower level monks in simple contribution. I think everyone will agree if PerlMonks degenerated into a cabal of higher-level monks we would lose PerlMonks' advantage to the Perl community as an entry point for new users. Being realistic, most new perl programmers probably feel they have very little to contribute in the way of posts or articles. This gives them a push in reading new articles, learning more, and (hopefully) contributing back.
• Increase return visits - This is an easy one. If you give someone something (that they value), then they will return. This increase in the raw number of the community will pay off.

I think you are looking at it from a narrow perspective. You have been a member for a year, you have made a large number of excellent posts, you started making posts early on, and have gained experience accordingly. I also assume from your posts you have had several years of experience before you entered PerlMonks. The experience I think you are missing is that of a new programmer entering PerlMonks. Their contribution level has to be low, they are mostly on the receiving end of teaching aspect of a community. Generally they have one avenue of contribution and that is marking what is of value to them. This is of value to the community as it represents the needs of the new programmer

There are disadvantages and there are people who exploit the system, but on a whole it works well and has worked well for a number of years. The abusers are few and they tend to drop out if their only means of contribution is voting. XP is hollow measurement. Eventually (most of) the abusers will realize that and either start adding real contributions or drop off. The ones that continue to vote dump, just ignore them.

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