I agree that I see no sense that the post in question should have been downvoted for any logical reason. Obvious case of a few personality down votes.

But the truth is, you have to take the good with the bad. I am willing to bet that a lot of personality up votes happen (to certain people anyway). So now what? You have votes going both ways for no real reason.

People are not perfect, and they will sometimes do something for the oddest reason, or even no reason at all. Maybe one of the posters was just mad at the world and spent all his votes on negative voting. It could happen. Thing is, you never know.

Merlyn, I completely understand your wanting to make sure that the votes will help "sort fact from fiction". That is absolutely what votes are for. Human nature will intrude however, and make the system non-perfect. That is unavoidable. So now what?

I think most of the people that come to this site have enough intelligence to (when they chose to) put any node under scrutiny and decide what they think of it no matter what the vote count is or who the author is. Yes, the votes will get messed up in relation to the quality of the node. But for the most part, people will still sort through the mess and do as they see fit with what they read. All it takes is a little time, a little patience, and people can discover those people around here who are good sources of information.



Roy Alan

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