Re: History now influences voting

[toma]

This change makes the site safer, but a bit less interesting.

I can always count on 2 or 3 downvotes for every node. I've been around long enough to have gathered a few enemies - it was never a problem when I was new.

Having enemies has tought me a valuable lesson - having enemies is expensive. Not a bad lesson, I think.

The current problem that I have is that I don't like to comment on stale nodes as much as I used to, because the 2 or 3 downvotes that I will get will not be balanced by upvotes, and I don't like to have too many nodes with negative XP. Will this change help with that?

Of course it could all be an illusion. People tend to see patterns where none exist. Adding complex logic will reinforce the will to see patterns. And who knows - the change might accidentally remove the bug in the random number generator that I have been taking advantage of :-).

[tye]

I've been around long enough to have gathered a few enemies

Such a common claim and so often wrong.

I can always count on 2 or 3 downvotes for every node.

Over the last 8 months you've had a grand total of 6 down-votes, each one cast by a different monk. In that same time you wrote about 16 nodes so your perception doesn't match recent reality. FYI.

The current problem that I have is that I don't like to comment on stale nodes as much as I used to, because the 2 or 3 downvotes that I will get will not be balanced by upvotes, and I don't like to have too many nodes with negative XP. Will this change help with that?

Hard to say. I suspect it will help some. There might be a tiny increase in odds of up-votes going to old threads due to heavily-down-voting monks just trying to get their voteavg up. :) Likely we'll see a reduction in the number of monks who list "comments on long-dead threads" among their pet peeves that are worth down-voting for. Maybe we'll get more monks hitting worst nodes looking for candidates to up-vote.

I think it will still be fairly common (though less common than it was before the change) for a "reasonable" node to get 1 or 2 downvotes. But I also think the change will greatly slow this trend.

[toma]

This is an interesting reply, and more than I wanted to know! Maybe I should revert to being a smacktard :-). But I haven't done much PM in the last 8 months, and I was thinking back to the 2002 to 2004 timeframe. I didn't know that the people who I have annoyed in the past have either forgotten about me or moved on. Of course PM makes it difficult to tell if such enemies really exist, and it may have been all in my mind.

I had no idea that some people are annoyed by replies to old nodes. Since I use PM as a reference, I appreciate them as long as they are informative, and I have found such replies helpful on several critical quests, on this site and others.

Thanks! Please keep us informed on how it all works out.