Wow. Just looked at my "home node." Been here off and on for FOUR years; I am but a lowly scribe. More OFF than ON, and I rarely vote... and I don't think I've ever voted down a post...

There was a period, years ago (literally) that I thought it would be cool to get a lot of XP. But then I found myself NOT adding to threads, fearing that I would be voted down for writing something that was "wrong."

This kills the point of web-as-collaborative-medium.

Seems to me that a good brainstorming session is full of "right" answers. But a great one is full of wrong answers with convincing counters.

If too many monks fall into the same trap I did early on and stick with it, then we all lose, as a community.

In many fields the veterans recognize some problems as unsolvable... the rookies, who don't know any better, poke around... and whaddayaknow? They solve them.

I just lost an XP point! I can't remember the name of the D&D XP draining creature, but it must not have forgotten me! Heh!
Anyway, when I started, I thought it was an interesting system, and actually had a lot of my tool questions answered by reading and lurking. Unfortunately, for most of the new topics, I either had no experience with that aspect of Perl (such as cg services since my Perl experience has been as a tool language to get things done and make it easier for me and not on te web side other than the random programming example) or they'd been answered by the usual suspects that know MUCH more than me about Perl. It wasn't a matter of being right, it was a lack of experience in the things that people were asking about or else the time that I happened to log in.
The longer I've been here, the less I've noticed XP other than the random "You've gained 1 point" or today's "ack! You'lost 1 point". But I've also noticed that a lot more people have ideas about the XP system than they did back in the day.
It seems that the monks have become very good at filtering the requests that would help the few, though the odd topic sometimes continues to plague us.
But, one of the reasons that I like coming here is that the troll base is low and usually killed off rather quickly. And the information is top-notch. Which is the reason I'm still around.