Wow, I had hoped I was making an intelligent, reasoned post; from all the responses, I guess I did OK! I'm not sure how to post when I'm not replying to just one node, so I'm replying to my original node, and linking to monks as I respond and comment.

As bluto, revdiablo, and graff point out, visibility and node depth in a thread can affect reputation, just by having more monks see a node (front page), or less monks see a node (too deep). But I'm not trying to suggest comparing between threads, only within a particular thread. So visibility should only be important in the sense of more total votes in a thread means the meaning we're assigning to reputation is more valid. But yes, late posts, or very deep nodes would probably suffer.

graff points out this:

To the extent that some replies are really good or really bad, this is often reflected in other replies -- later posters tend to comment on earlier ones, especially regarding errors, but often in terms like "So-and-so above gave you the right answer". In the absence of such comments, earlier replies are either okay or irrelevant, and that's usually obvious from content.

which is a very good point. Obviously your own common sense and study of the replies, plus information from other sources, will help you judge what is a good answer. And to a certain degree, I suppose checking the XP level of the replier would help you judge the accuracy of the answer.

Continuing with graff, I didn't understand this:

... The scores work okay as a reflection of value (esp. for the person getting the points), but they don't work well as a determiner of value -- it's a subtle distinction.

I guess it's too subtle for me ;) Could you explain?

Crackers2, zdog, and bobf mentioned having a "Not Going To Vote" button, so you could see the rep. I guess that would satisfy my suggestion, with the added benefit that all monks could see the reps if they want to. Actually, I would think that wouldn't be too hard to implement, but again, this is coming from someone with absolutely no knowledge of the code involved.

Crackers2 and bobf thought a total vote count, or closing a node to voting after a period of time, might be beneficial. I would have to agree with bobf that a total vote count would probably be more trouble than it's worth. At first, I thought closing a node to voting might be a bad thing, but bobf makes a good point that while that wouldn't let a long term worthwile post like a tutorial keep garnering points, but after awhile (100? 200? 300?) does it really matter? I think once it gets high enough, everyone can tell, It Is A Good Node.

bobf points out

I find the discussion in this thread interesting, but I wonder if a more complex voting system would tend to encourage people to focus even more on node rep and XP (complexity might correlate with perceived importance).

Well, my thought is to see if rep has value, and if so, then a certain amount of focus on it should be a good thing. Focusing on XP should be a separate matter. There's probably no way to control that, and if certain monks vote just to increase XP, well, then like I said in my original post, those votes should be kind of random, and not favor any particular node, within a thread anyway.

Mention of XP made me think of another (probably incredibly hard to implement) idea.

What if when you see the rep, you see another number that says how much rep was contibuted by monks at (say) level 5 or above? (Flame away!)

coreolyn says

In the end the 'best' answer is the one that works best for you, the beauty of this place is the variety to pick from.

That kind of gets to the heart of my idea, I guess. Yeah, I can try all the responses and find out which ones "work". But what about things that aren't cut and dried to newbies: style, efficiency, elegance, etc? Those are the kinds of things it would be nice to know, too.

And finally, I have to say I can relate to sintadil. I've watched my XP climb on almost every refresh of the screen today. And while it's really cool, I have to wonder about a post of mine like this, that has gathered a rep=32 as of this writing. My highest rep! And it's a question to an OP asking for clarification! Probably nothing of any value to anyone except me. (Maybe a bunch of new novices wanted to vote for someone as confused as they are?)

But, to be fair to my original idea, that post of mine is not a technical reply. No one will be comparing its rep to another node.

<shameless_hometown_plug>I would have posted earlier, but Johan Santana pitched for the Twins tonight, and I didn't want to miss the next American League Cy Young Award winner show his stuff ;) (Sorry to any White Sox fans: Twins 10, White Sox 2)</shameless_hometown_plug>

TheEnigma