Re: Thoughtless voting?

[ww]

At this point, I'm becoming afraid that some of my phrasing is so clumsy as to lead respondents far from anything I'm advocating.

1. My rationale is that before casting any vote, up or down, we should have made a careful judgement about the value of the node's content; that what appears to me to be random ('thoughtless') upvoting is per se, a bad thing for the Monastery's utility and reputation. That belief led to my attempt a desire to spark considered conversation and thoughtful assessment of whether what I think I see is anything we -- all of us who care about PM -- need to be concerned about, and, if so, whether some approach to discouraging 'thoughtless voting' is desireable and workable.
2. I'm NOT "proposing" any of the "flawed" options listed in the OP; in fact, my real hope is that some wiser head will come up with an approach that provides better value for whatever cost it might impose on the Monastery and the Monks
3. Nothing in my word "penalizing" is intended to suggest any more draconian remedy than is already applied to those who spend an excessive proportion of their allotment on downvotes. The notion of taking away "your right to vote" is more than a few steps beyond anything in my list.
4. As to "advocating for constraints on how people should assess value..."

   Actually I favor conscientiously applied *personal* constraints (something we call those 'ethics' or the like), but definitely do NOT "advocate constraints" in the sense of favoring externally imposed limitations designed to prohibit or prevent people from assessing value for themselves.

   Rather, I note that we restrain ourselves from many actions; most agree that defecating in the street is something we won't allow ourselves to do; conventionally, murder is deprecated. So too, in some cultures, is offering disrespect to one's parents. Why should we not restrain ourselves from casting upvotes for nodes which fail -- for the voter -- some test of "goodness." If anything, my arguement would be, 'if it isn't affirmatively good, don't upvote it. Simply refrain from voting!'

And, yes, I do realize that many nodes with a few positive votes also have negative overall rep. But random upvoting -- like random downvoting -- dilutes the value of rep. (Personally, I don't check best nodes or worst very often. Mostly, if I pay a visit there its because there's a shortage of new nodes or threads (past day or so) so I'm looking for something to learn from... and higher rep suggests some large plurality of those voting regarded a node as very good... or very bad. I'd love to see the day when that's actually a valid metric.

[tye]

I don't see where you've made a good case that something needs to be fixed. Your assessment of "random upvoting" is based on your failure to understand why somebody would upvote a particular node. You fail to even link to the nodes so I won't waste time trying to look at the details that you fail to present.

But even just from the information you provided, the upvotes don't surprise me at all. A node getting to -12 for "lack of effort" is a quirk of the voting system (being mildly annoying in a well-noticed way can lead to getting a lot of downvotes despite the mild nature of the annoyance) and I'm not at all surprised to find people that conscientiously and helpfully try to counter that quirk by upvoting nodes where they perceive that the accumulation of downvotes is too extreme for the actual offense.

Knowledge of this quirk is evident in that worst nodes was already mentioned.

[mr_mischief]

As I've already said in this node, there is no vote for "very good" nor "very bad". There are two votes, or a lack of a vote. Those are '++', '--', and '+=0'. There is no way short of registering and voting under multiple accounts to apply any sort of qualifier of scale to a vote except deciding whether or not to leave the vote unmade.

One hundred monks who barely think a node deserves a '++' but vote that way confer upon the node the same votes that count the same toward reputation as one hundred monks who think the node is one of the best ever posted and likewise vote '++'. They confer 100 votes upon the node in either case. Those who think it is highly worthy are more likely to respond with praise, but they cannot vote '+=5' and only '++'.

The plurality is the only way nodes get a net reputation, not by magnitude of votes but by quantity. There is a huge difference between being widely popular and being well-loved by any individual.