Re: The purpose of voting

Voting & the resulting XP could be seen as a means of conditioning/learning. If you say something that people like, whether it's technical or not, they may well upvote it. That gives them a reward (semi-tangible if they get an xp point from voting, but also in the form of engaging with the community), gives you a reward in the form of xp, and helps to make the site community more cohesive. The reward encourages people to express their opinions of nodes regularly & hence both strengthens the community and (eventually) highlights to an extent whether a node contains something valuable.

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.

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g0n, backpropagated monk

Comment on Re: The purpose of voting

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Re^2: The purpose of voting by monarch (Priest) on Jun 06, 2005 at 06:46 UTC
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!	[reply]
Re^3: The purpose of voting by g0n (Priest) on Jun 06, 2005 at 09:17 UTC
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. -------------------------------------------------------------- g0n, backpropagated monk	[reply]