I find participating in SO extremely annoying. Tried few times and gave up.
I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none.
In general, there's just too much reputation whoring going on. Just flipped through the list of opened questions, and I can easily answer 80% of those without thinking. But I won't, because I don't like how SO is treating me. Should they hide all scores similarly to how pg did here, I think it would make the site much more attractive for participation for people like myself.
Feel free to disagree (preferably by answering and not downvoting).
Your experience is different than mine. My answers usually seem to get voted up proportionally to how good they are. Granted, it's been a while since I've actively participated, so things may have changed.
I was going to just downvote your reply, until I got to the last line :).
Sites like SO have a HUGE "newbie" problem. If they allowed brand new users full permissions to upvote, downvote, etc., there would be a lot more "wrong" votes from people who don't understand the site yet.
I started at zero, and yet I was able to gain enough reputation to function. The usefulness of your answer is not directly dependent on your reputation.
There is a small advantage to having a high rep score, but I haven't noticed it being that big a handicap. Usually the difference is that people with low rep scores just haven't learned how to write a good answer. But given equal quality answers, I haven't noticed that low-rep people are at all that much of a disadvantage. Obviously I can't say for sure, but I really have to believe that either a) you're giving answers on topics that have built up a bad SO community around them, or b) your answers are lacking in some area other than factual correctness.
I don't know what effect hiding votes would have on SO, but suspect it will be an interesting experiment nevertheless.
I have indeed faced some of the newbie problems, though my complaints usually are around the comment everywhere, and editing other answers privilege. There are lots of answers, i see i can improve by asking a explanatory question?
I understand why editing others' answer has that requirement the the comment everywhere seems too much to me.
It's spam prevention. Everyone is actively reading questions and answers so spam in those types of posts gets reported immediately and deleted. Comments are unobtrusive (new comments on a post don't bump it back up to the top of the active queue like new answers do) so fewer people are looking at them. If anyone at all could comment at any time, spammers would have a zero-barrier point of entry. Setting the limit at 50 reputation gives people a very low hurdle to get over before they can comment.
> I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first.
Yeah, that's kind of the idea. Why would anyone trust you until you've proven yourself? Do you just want privileges handed to you?
> If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none.
Who in the hell is going to look at your reputation score before voting on your answer? You only have to help one person (the one asking the question) to get an upvote. Trust me, no one cares what your reputation score is.
> Just flipped through the list of opened questions, and I can easily answer 80% of those without thinking. But I won't, because I don't like how SO is treating me.
That pretty much tells me everything I need to know about you. If your comments here are any indication of the kind of contribution you can make, then thank you for not bringing your bullshit to Stack Overflow.
Lovely response. Thank you for taking time to type it.
The original point was that the very existence of SO reputation entices the wrong kind of priorities and behavior on the site. Hence the "newbie" problem.
What I would've done is this:
(a) hide reputation counters from the public view
(b) for questions - let people upvote them or report them, no downvoting
(c) for answers/comments - replace up/down arrows with four choices - "perfect", "right", "incomplete" and "wrong" - and then show how many users clicked on each. Let anyone vote, including anonymous users.
(d) let the original submitter pick the "right" answer (just as it is now)
That's it. Badges-shmadges. These are vanity trinkets. If people are less inclined to help, when others are not seeing their social rank paraphernalia, that's doesn't speak much of them, does it?
I don't think you understand the "newbie" problem, as it has nothing to do with reputation and everything to do with real-world knowledge. Until you've proven that you have a little bit of knowledge (and not just arrogantly asserted it) you don't get to vote. If anyone could vote immediately then every post that got linked on reddit would have 250,000 useless upvotes.
I can't downvote an answer that is patently absurd. I can't upvote an answer that is right. Apparently that's because I have to prove myself first. If I write a response (that damn sure answers the question), it sits at zero, because its usefulness appears to be directly dependent on my reputation, of which I have none.
In general, there's just too much reputation whoring going on. Just flipped through the list of opened questions, and I can easily answer 80% of those without thinking. But I won't, because I don't like how SO is treating me. Should they hide all scores similarly to how pg did here, I think it would make the site much more attractive for participation for people like myself.
Feel free to disagree (preferably by answering and not downvoting).