Re: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good

My understanding is that my votes are for what I want to do with them. I almost never use --, and I frequently ++ nodes just because I read them all the way to the bottom. Is that definitely wrong? If a node is incorrect in some way, then people will reply to it. In my mind, the ++ means it was worth reading, not necessarily that it's the right answer. Is that definitely wrong?

Who are the subjective voting police? I think the reputation system indicates something other than correctness. I don't know what it is, but correctness isn't really what it's for. Further, some of my favorite nodes (actually threads) are offtopic arguments between knowledgeable Perl people with very different ideas.

It doesn't make much sense to -- a node when I'm frantically clicking all the way down the thread to see what they say next.

UPDATE: I fail to see why someone upvoting a cut and paste and/or link to docs is somehow invalid. It's their ++ to spend how they will and sometimes the correct answer really is in the documentation. I think some people also -- nodes that could have been solved with super search, something I definitely disagree with, but it's their --, they can spend it how they like. Isn't that the point?

-Paul

Comment on Re: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good

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Re^2: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good by Porculus (Hermit) on Jun 03, 2009 at 21:18 UTC
I think lostjimmy is objecting to the mindless upvoting of bad nodes. Your "offtopic arguments between knowledgeable Perl people" are potentially very good nodes, very worth reading; they will almost certainly contain interesting and original thoughts. They are light-years away from the kind of things we see in the examples lostjimmy linked: responses that not only don't answer the question, but often consist entirely of paraphrases of basic documentation, or -- worse still -- purely mechanical copy-and-paste jobs. It's hard to believe that all the people who upvoted those are saying that they felt them to be worth reading. It seems much more likely that the voters haven't read the responses any more carefully than the responders read the original question: it just seems to be a case of "node is something about foo, response also mentions foo, automatic ++".	[reply]

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Re^2: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good
by Porculus (Hermit) on Jun 03, 2009 at 21:18 UTC

I think lostjimmy is objecting to the mindless upvoting of bad nodes. Your "offtopic arguments between knowledgeable Perl people" are potentially very good nodes, very worth reading; they will almost certainly contain interesting and original thoughts. They are light-years away from the kind of things we see in the examples lostjimmy linked: responses that not only don't answer the question, but often consist entirely of paraphrases of basic documentation, or -- worse still -- purely mechanical copy-and-paste jobs.

It's hard to believe that all the people who upvoted those are saying that they felt them to be worth reading. It seems much more likely that the voters haven't read the responses any more carefully than the responders read the original question: it just seems to be a case of "node is something about foo, response also mentions foo, automatic ++".

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