Makeshifts last the longest.

But what does noderep measure? Nothing useful. The largest correlation noderep has with anything is "number of times viewed". Just look at your own nodes, see which ones got a high noderep. I bet most of them are in threads that have been frontpaged, and are posts that you posted relatively early in the threads. Almost all the time when I look at my list of writings, and spot a node with high noderep, it's in a thread that was frontpaged, and that I had an early reply in a thread. Replying in a thread that's two days old will hardly give you any XP, no matter how good it was.

Another factor that plays in role in making nodereputation useless is the pressure to vote. People seem to eager to vote, get rewarded with XP to vote, and lots of people even use up all the votes they get on a day.

I can see merit in having somekind of node reputation. I don't seen any merit in the system we have now.

Abigail

We may differ in our notions of usefulness.

I think that this periodic discussion might be more fruitful if eXPerience were named something like Site Contribution. Because that is pretty much what it measures, and what it is intended to increase.

Believe it or not, contributing wonderful nodes that nobody reads contributes very little value to the users of the site. Contributing an obvious node with useful information that many people read contributes a lot more. (Where the site is measured in terms of value to our actual users, and not a minority of very knowledgable ones.) The relative XP ratings of the two nodes reflect that.

The system is obviously imperfect, but it works fairly well for that goal. It doesn't work on everyone - for instance it has no apparent effect on you. But it affects you indirectly because it contributes to the site's success and that success in turn creates an atmosphere that draws people like yourself.

(An amusing aside. None of the top posters seem to me to be very much motivated by XP. I find that slightly amusing...)

Other voting systems evolved at other sites for other goals. Generally most of them accomplish their stated goal reasonably well. Most of them do not accomplish the goals that other sites set out as well as they do their own. This is somewhat natural. Success should be measured in the context of the goals of the system.

Therefore, other than suggesting that the highly misleading word experience be replaced by something else, I have no major objections to having the current meaningless measure being used.

Oh, I'm not saying it's measuring anything tangible. However, there's one case where noderep as by the current system is useful: nodes with rep < -1, esp rep < -4 or so.

It works quite well as a deterrent for "fluff" and a way to control the tone. While it doesn't prevent anonymous trolling, I've found that that is mostly ignored here. Overall, PM has a striking tendency to put out flames quite quickly. I've very rarely seen the tone go beyond heated debated.

To me, that's a big part of the appeal of PM.

Makeshifts last the longest.

...Replying in a thread that's two days old will hardly give you any XP, no matter how good it was...

Maybe you should only be given XP as a voter when voting on nodes that are at least 24 hours old? Maybe that would encourage looking through the Monastery for old nodes that may be applicable.

Similarly, maybe you should only be able to get XP as a voter on one node in a thread. As soon as you have voted once on a node in a thread, you will never get XP for a vote on another node in that thread.

Liz

We could just rename XP to Lastitude. As in that dude has lots of lastitude....he's been around forever! :-)

I have to agree with getting rid of XP. Although its a nice way to judge someones probability of being right, its not realy a measure. As a fairly new monk myself, its kinda a barier to entry, as i'd like to participate in the design of the site but am not allowed until a higher level. Then agian maybe barriers to entry are needed, i'm not sure though :-)

I have to agree with getting rid of XP. Although its a nice way to judge someones probability of being right, its not realy a measure.

You misunderstand. XP does not, in any means, give any clue whether the poster is saying something sensible or not. There is no correlation between having a high XP and having Perl knowledge. XP is not a nice way to judge someone.

Abigail

I said judge someones probability of being right because as new monks come thats the only thing available to them as that kind of indicator. After a short time you learn that it is a bad idea to judge anything at all by XP, but by calling it Experience it gives the feeling that people with high experience will be right.

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Eric Hodges

Abigail-II, what's your opinion on reputation? Does it measure something?

Thank you, Valerio