Something is flawed here. Maybe the site, maybe your reasoning, maybe me.

Ideally, the XP system serves as peer review and as a useful aid to those browsing the site. In some immediate sense, it probably does.

I could be missing something here, but if XP gives a guide to how good/useful/clever (pick any two) a node is, then I don't know what it is until after I have voted.

In this respect the voting system here is very different from slashdot's moderation. Oops, I may be saying something silly here. Only once have I been blessed with moderater status on slashdot and I can't recall whether the score is hidden or not. But I believe that it is visible before you cast your vote.

What I am trying to say is that XP doesn't really help you sort the sheep from the goats, you have to expend a precious vote to find out what other people thought about a particular node (unless it has been blessed or cursed). That is, people casually browsing the site have no idea whether one node with a bit of reasonable looking code has a rep of -5 (because it didn't use strict) or a rep of +23 (because it replaced a mess of code by an elegant hack involving File::Find).

update: Well, you learn something everyday. chromatic just messaged me to say that in fact you can get an idea of rank by setting Note order to Best first instead of Chronological in user settings. So I'm going to experiment with that for a while. Although it begs the question, why can't you view notes sorted by the poster's total XP?...

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