in reply to Guidance for a beginner with a bad reputation
If you're concerned about it, you could do a user search on yourself, sort by reputation, and then compare your higest-rated nodes with your lowest-rated nodes, which might let you pick out a trend of which kinds of nodes get voted up and which don't. It may not just be about content, but also clarity and tone, in some cases, though solid content will tend to salvage poor tone, at least somewhat. I looked through some of your lowest-rated nodes, though, and most of them didn't seem too bad to me. (There was one that was pretty much content-free, something about ignoring a previous node; that sort of thing is best put in an update to the same node, IMO. But that's just one node; nearly all of us have one or two bloopers like that.)
I wouldn't worry too much about minor negative nodes. The way the voting system works, as best I understand it, it takes more than ten -5 nodes to negate the impact on your XP of a single +50 node. Besides, XP have no materiel value.
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