in reply to Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good

Strictly speaking, there are three possible votes: +1, -1, and abstain. I almost never down-vote a node, but I often don't up-vote a node that I just read. Disapproval by silence, if you will.

I spend up-votes on nodes that surprise me, amuse me, or generate a healthy discussion. I front-page a node if it has an 'interesting' point to make; or talks about a technology that I am interested in.

Otherwise, I read the Newest Nodes for a couple of hours daily (in dribs and drabs spread over a ten to twelve hour period) and I try to expend all of my votes before I am done. I have a couple of favorite authors that I read everything they write (as well as a couple or three folks that I ignore on principal); to that extent we are in collusion.

Folks conspiring to up-vote on each other's nodes don't bother me that much. XP is merely an artifact of the Monastery - it's not like I can convert 1,000XP into fifteen Quatloo's or three Euro's or something. There will always be folks trying to 'game the system' for what ever reason. Over time, their efforts will wash out into the Noise, and they will go away once they get tired of their silly game. As an example of something that I don't think will droip into the noise-band, I give you Abigail-II; I am still reading through his/her corpus and learning new techniques and ways of looking at Perl.

----
I Go Back to Sleep, Now.

OGB

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good
by Gavin (Archbishop) on Jun 04, 2009 at 16:57 UTC

    I'm with you Old Gray Bear my sentiments exactly even down to reading Abigail-II and others who no longer frequent PM.

[reply]
Re^2: Down-vote Bad, Up-vote Good
by Argel (Prior) on Jun 08, 2009 at 21:02 UTC
    I think "do not vote at this time" is a better fit than "abstain". If there really was a way to abstain then it should cost a vote and be be saved away so that we can see the reputation of the node. As it stands right now you can always go back and vote later on. Beyond that I agree with most of what you said.

    Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks
[reply]

      For me, it is not the case that "abstain" implies "refrain from voting forever" and not "refrain from voting for now". I kinda guess it comes down to how you internally model the concept of "election" with regard to PM. If you consider a node to be an election, then abstaining means deciding to never vote on that node (vs. just waiting to maybe cast your vote). If you consider each time you view a node as a potential new election, then just because you abstained in previous elections doesn't mean you will continue to abstain in future elections involving that same node. But I guess that not being able to vote in a future election just because you voted previously may present a problem for such an internal model.

      But perhaps it also comes from actively deciding to refrain vs. just not bothering to (yet). If one feels that "deciding to not decide (yet) is still a decision", then to "refrain" is probably more likely to imply "refrain for now".

      If we eventually offer an "I will never vote on this" option, then it will need to avoid XP benefits (including the "cast all votes" benefit). I lean toward it costing more than "one vote" as well... And do we add a feature to show how many people have opted out of voting on each node? (:

      But I don't think I can call such an option simply "abstain". Too bad my thesaurus does not list "recuse", as I find that it comes closer in some respects. But thesauring "abstain" brings up "abjure" which sounds promising (or the even less common "abnegate"). 

        ( )++ ( )-- (.)defer ( )abjure

      [download]

      - tye        

[reply]
[d/l]
        FYI, I was thinking more of traditional voting in political systems, such as the UN security council where we are used to hearing that X voted for, Y voted against, and Z abstained (or something like that). I would consider it a "neutral" vote so it might be worth including in "x number of votes" info. And of course XP benefits and penalties should not apply and the XP penalty for too many downvotes should be unaffected. I'm curious as to why you think it should cost more than 1 vote? With that said, I'm not sure if it would really be worth the time to implement -- for me it would be more of a curiosity thing.

        Elda Taluta; Sarks Sark; Ark Arks
[reply]

In Section Perl Monks Discussion