in reply to Up-voting exceptional articles by two points

Happy New Year and thank you for all for your opinions. I am a little perplexed that out of 16 votes, 8 were down-votes (that's for the head of this post). Why are people down-voting when an opinion is asked for? Do I sense unnecessary emotion?
  • Comment on Re: Up-voting exceptional articles by two points

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Up-voting exceptional articles by two points
by davido (Cardinal) on Jan 01, 2007 at 02:35 UTC

    It is my experience that (right or wrong) some people tend to upvote PerlMonks Discussion nodes they agree with, and downvote ones they disagree with, almost as if that voting is a way of casting an opinion on the topic, rather than casting a vote on the node's quality. Combine that with the fact that just about any node that discusses the XP and voting system tends to be a magnet for erratic voting, and you're sure to see a few downvotes.

    I wouldn't worry about it too much if I were you. Go out and celebrate the new year.


    Dave

Re^2: Up-voting exceptional articles by two points
by shmem (Chancellor) on Jan 01, 2007 at 14:11 UTC
    You could derive from the votings that proposals for changes to the voting/XP system are not well received by some monks; the downvotes could mean disapproval of either the idea of mutiple votes, or raising the issue at all, or both.

    But maybe the node has been downvoted because you have sinned: You lusted for increasing the importance of your approval or disapproval statement over someone else's: it would not be the node that get's distinguished thusly, but your opinion's impact on it's reputation, visible only to yourself, since the mere sum of up/downvotes are on display.

    A scale of votes, no matter how it's grained (-2..+2 ? -10..+10 ?) would break the rule that every voter has one vote for a candidate (a node in this context). It would convert the simple (dis)approval into a jury type thing (think figure skating), call for a second number in the reputation's display (number of voters) and probably for a way to see who did cast how many votes.

    Your proposal would complicate things, probably break anonymity and has been discussed before.

    --shmem

    _($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                                  /\_¯/(q    /
    ----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
    ");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}