Re^2: History now influences voting

[xdg]

I guess you mean "genuine criticism" in the sense of the intro line from the old series The Critic: "It Stinks!". I think that intro line was meant to be ironic.

I meant it more in the sense of "downvoting a crappy node" versus "exercising a vendetta against a poster". In my opinion, there are plenty of reasons for downvoting out of genuine criticism:

• incorrect answer to a question
• boring or otherwise uninsightful meditation
• bad suggestions for changes to Perl Monks
• inappropriate language (profanity, personal attacks)
• trolls

In many of those cases, it's not even worth the time for a written reply -- so I guess in that sense, a downvote does just mean "It Stinks!"

N.B. I missed the $vtavg in the chance of losing XP in my first readthrough -- that does lessen the impact substantially and probably does away with the need for my suggestion #2.

[Argel]

And in the case of trolls, replying to them could be considered "feeding the trolls". I suppose a "Stop feeding the trolls" message would be fine but I'm not sure how effective they are. That code to hide responses from our troll back in October seemed to be much more effective though.

[tye]

Yes, being relatively cavalier with dishing out chances for other people to lose XP soon may require one to be slightly cavalier with chances of losing one's own XP.