Sure, it's "easy to vote in a 'shabby' manner" -- voting can even be mechanized. But ysth's reply concurs with my own experience, and frankly I don't mind admitting that I am somewhat more of an optimist that you seem to be about the "voting motivation for people in general" -- or at least, about their observable voting behavior.

If you take the time to look over the Best Nodes and Worst Nodes, you should be able to recognize a fairly high degree of correlation between the vote ratings and the actual quality of nodes. You can also go through the nodes of any chosen monk in order of vote ranking (highest or lowest first) and you'll generally see the same correlation (though of course you need to factor in some "social effects", such as whether or not a given node appears in a thread that is "front-paged" to the Monastery Gates).

Also, cchampion's reply cites what I believe are serious problems with the first and second ideas you proposed at the top of the thread, and your response to that really misses the mark: your pessimistic notions about "shabiness" and "spite" (and perhaps careless or random action) in voting behavior are not supported by evidence at PM; your misunderstandings about the reasons why people downvote and the relation between negative rep and reaping are, I'm guessing, a matter of not having been here very long.

If people are given a simple and anonymous means for freely expressing approval or disapproval without inflicting physical or financial damage on the recipient, I believe they will in general apply those means honestly and with due deliberation. The whole vast economy of opinion polls and TV ratings is based on this point of view.

But if the means of expression comes at personal cost ("I'll lose XP if I downvote this guy") or is not anonymous ("This guy might pay special attention to people who downvote him, in ways I'd rather not deal with"), then it obviously ceases to be free expression, and this will translate directly into less expression: people will keep quiet. ("If you can't say something nice, don't say anything.")

So I'm supporting your first alternative: "Don't change a thing."

In my experience, how you should react to a downvoted node depends on the section. Here in perl monks discussion, people tend to downvote things they disagree with, whereas elsewhere they tend to downvote things for inaccuracy (if you see the distinction). And everywhere for social reasons, of course.

Of course votes in spite exist. Can't you choose to ignore them instead of putting yourself at the same level of people whose behavior you disparage?

I do. :-)

Some entertaining reading for your enlightenment:

• Possible changes to Voting/XP
• Why down vote is soo easy?! (particular source of meditation is Re: Why down vote is soo easy?!)
• Why your product is sold?
• -ve XP, node reputation, voting and learning
• /msg me the reason of --