what I'm trying to say is I would rather have 1 vote on the snippet and 0 votes on the comments that don't really contribute anything useful to the community.

If your post got upvoted, someone read it and agreed, or enjoyed it enough to vote on it, so it did contribute something, however intangible, to the community.

But do we really want to learn this way?

In any system of voting it comes down to the integrity of the people doing the voting.

In my week and a half on this site I've come to quickly notice some reasonably ugly behaviour - and surprised to see that intolerant attacks sometimes receive high references! update: of course this is in the minority..

Subjective posts move up and down in popular whims.. and providing an objective reasoned argument does not always win votes. This seems consistant with any political system.. when was the last time an intelligent leader won office in any country?

And like TedPride mentions in this very thread, voting is often done lazilly - in other words, a subjective post that evokes an emotion is simple to respond to. A posting of code requires a thorough evaluation by the reader to determine the usefulness and accuracy of the post.

Which leads me to think, should the weight of a single vote change depending on your status? IE should a saint's vote be worth, say, 3 times the value of a monk's (on the assumption that a Saint votes more judiciously than a Monk)? Whilst, in a perfect world, I wish this were so, I have seen some odd behaviour by some Saints, too.. meaning I'm not sure I would like to see such a blanket rule rolled out.

Oh well, it's an imperfect world. Just play with the system you have. update: I just want to mention that the above is outlining exceptions to otherwise good voting behaviour.. I think the majority of programmers have a lot of pride and respect for each other and approach technical excellence with maturity.. after all you have to have some mental maturity to be a programmer in the first place!

Well, OK. The system doesn't work perfectly, but that isn't surprising. You do occasionally see ugly behaviour around here, and sometimes from people who've been around a long time. I note that you've been visiting the site for a week and a half, and I think I know the thread you mean - that kind of overt argument is unusual. I'd been visiting PM almost daily for several months before I became aware of those personal animosities that do exist.

Generally speaking, politeness is highly prized on PM. As far as noderep goes, take a longer view. This node, for example (one of my favourites), has a rep at time of writing of 309. Conversely, I have a node somewhere that gained a couple of votes after I had struck out the text and put in an update saying my answer to the OP was wrong. Assumably this was because people were voting up adherence to local rules (don't leave a wrong answer in a thread, edit and correct it for posterity). The 'final' rep of that node is something like 3 or 4, which I guess (rightly) places it firmly down the bottom end of the noderep distribution curve. So sometimes nodes pick up a few votes for reasons other than correctness.

Many monks, myself among them, are very reluctant to downvote nodes, and of course some people are less tolerant of mistakes & rudeness than others, so nodes that are borderline obnoxious often get a few votes. But they are never going to be in really big numbers.

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g0n, backpropagated monk

As consistent with my personality, I always attempt to find patterns to simplify things -- and I noticed the same pattern that you have.

I'm of the personal opinion that many people don't read the nodes about questions that they don't know about, and/or don't vote in that section as they're not qualified to determine if it's a good response or not. Philosophical questions, on the other hand, is more a way of stating your opinions, and so you can vote someone up on the appearance of being a good idea, without knowing if it's technically accurate.

I'm basing this mostly on my postings in various SOAP nodes on Perl Monks -- they never get significantly upvoted. If I answer something which I find to be quote minor in some of the more-read topics (mySQL, CGI, OO, etc.), it's likely to get as many upvotes as in the less-read categories that take much more thought and effort.

It's also possible that the technical threads don't tend to get re-read as often. I know that if I read something, and saw that someone had already given a good answer, and I thought it was resolved, I don't tend to go back and re-read it. For the philisophical threads, there is no true resolution, so I will go and check to see what new comments have been added (and thus, I'm more likely to upvote posts that were significantly after the node's inception)

I think the only thing that we can really show is that the number of votes for a node have too many variables involved to be just a measure of the overall quality. Likewise, XP is only an indicator of how much XP you have.

I don't know how it is with you, but personally, from my posts, the ones that have the greatest rep do talk about perl. These are invariably thread-starters: replies don't get much attention, although if you look at Selected Best Nodes, you'll surely see some.

Also, you may want to know that posts about voting usually get lots of downvotes. Yes, this applies to my post too.

I'm ok with being down voted. Really, the reputation score means little to me but thank you for the heads-up.

Here is a thread which you may find interesting on XP - which discusses voting a bit.

Also, you may want to go to some Saint's home node, go to the list of their nodes, and sort their nodes by reputation, high first, you may be surprised by some of the nodes that are among their top. Of course, it won't tell you what the reputations are, but you can get that their top ones are at least the ones that got the most votes.

Bottom line: nodes that contribute the most to PM's members get more votes. Nodes that contribute to PM, but only to a few members, may get fewer votes.

Maybe its the two bourbons I've just had but I can't tell if you just said something very profound or something very silly. Maybe its both. Either way you made me laugh any-any and thats the best I hope for in a thread about voting. Thank-you and ++.

--
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. -Basho

1. Do not take XP and reputation too seriously in this community. XP does not necessarily indicate level of expertise with Perl but is more of a very rough estimate about the involvment in the community.
2. There are a number of other factors besides the content of your post that might have a large influence on your post's reputation. eg: if the thread in which you posted makes the FrontPage then typically it will have larger people voiting (+ or -) than if it were not FP'ed
3. See point #1
4. The topic of the thread can be a factor on how mancy people would even read it and consider voting on nodes in that thread. (eg: I am not involved with Apple or OSX in any way and will usually skip any threads involving that topic.)
5. Did you see point #1 ?
6. Other posts in the thread can also influence your node reputation to some extent.
7. You really should see point #1!
8. Another thing to keep in mind is posts related to reputation and XP tend to get downvoted, especially if they are asking for changes to the site or whin^H^H^H^H^H complaining about (or lack of) a feature
9. Personality or User oriented download-voting is an ugly reality. However, it has not been that bad in the Perlmonks community. Most people are really really nice most of the time. In case you do think it is a big issue and you are worried about losing XP, you should see point #1 again.

What was point one again? ;)

Then down at the bottom are points for posting a useful reply. Occasionally you can get a lot of points for this as well, but the number of points is generally in reverse proportion to the complexity of the topic.

I think the reason for all this is that scattershot voting is easier than voting on social topics, and voting on social topics is a lot less work than voting on posts replying to SoPW, and simple SoPW posts are easier to choose between than those on complex topics. I'm partially to blame for that last myself, since I have to pass up voting on a lot of the system or module-related Perl questions due to lack of knowledge, but I also rarely upvote a social post or SoPW thread starter. Posts don't deserve points unless they contribute to general knowledge.

1. Clear and well thought out questions (succinct code snippets, illustrative errors and explainations of methodology).
2. Effort (on the part of the OP) to answer the question prior to posting, this includes what research they have done as well as any attempts to identify where the holes in their understanding lie.
3. Replies with code snippets and explainations.
4. Replies with code critiques and suggestions bolstered by either documentation or benchmark findings.
5. Replies with gently guidance to relavent documentation, not just a read the docs link to a module but rather where to look in concert with what to look at/for.
6. Lastly: willingness to admit mistakes, misunderstandings or personal short-comings.