No, no. If you are going to troll, you are supposed to compare me to Hilter not Machievelli. The more I try to compose a reply, the less I think your sentiment is serious.

Unless the node author is not a member, then the values I'm talking about apply to them as well. (And if they aren't a member, then anything to do with experience/reputation doesn't much apply to them anyway.)

So I have no desire to *encourage* it. I see value in allowing it.

I didn't discuss the reasons I see value in it (and I won't now). I was only discussing why I think it is a misktake to encourage it.

                - tye

I was not trolling - so I'll try to clarify a bit my point. What I see here is that new users think that the XP points have some arbitrary value - that they are in fact indicator of the experience of the user. That is the reason they improve their posts to maximalize the XP gain. But the generall stance in the community here is that XP means nothing. So generally they exchange their valuable time to improve their posts for nothing. This is not fair.

Recently I have been reading online about the so called 'Gift Economies'. This is the model of relationship that should be applicable for most onlie communities (and for the community of scietific research too). What I found is that in most cases the 'Gift Economy' is in fact still all about exchange, but the exchage is not between individual humans but between a member of the community and the community as a whole. The value the community is giving back to the member is his reputation. This is quite natural for people to interpret XP as a measure of this kind of reputation.

The machiavellian part is in that you have people do the good things for a false reason. It works because they either stay at PM for enough time to learn about the true nature of reputation or they go away and don't disturb the working of The Monastery.

Ooh, yuck! Then we'll just have lots of people mass-abstaining then wishing they could vote when they see how things stand.

I don't see that as being a real problem. First, if they would really find themselves wishing they could vote after the fact, either they would have voted rather than abstained or they are wishing that they could use the revealed reps as input to their own voting decision process, an input which is wisely disallowed. Furthermore, if they were truly disappointed that they had chosen to abstain, that self-imposed punishment would eventually teach them not to abstain unless they were sure they wanted to.

You seem to be going under the impression that voting is something people are loath to do and that they would much rather just reveal the super secret node reps. I think people would get more enjoyment of feeling like they made some small difference by weighing in with their own vote than they would from just observing.

We'll have much less useful voting in general and less input into the rating system, which I feel would make it less useful than it is.

You don't think the voting would be more useful due to the elimination of random votes made just for the purpose of revealing the rep? I do (if only because I know I wouldn't do it anymore.)

If an abstain was treated as a regular vote (with the chance for XP) it could benefit the system by helping to minimize the random votes made just for the purpose of maximizing XP gain.

Treating it as a regular vote without the chance for XP nullifies those possible benefits.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";