Okay. Peer reviews are a part of life. Even if I don't post on Gamedev, I will probably still have peer reviews in college.

My favorite part of all this is that, although people disagree with me, they have been pretty nice and fair to me here. Especially considering I'm bringing up the subject of the rating system, a subject which as Hodgeman said, can potentially get someone in trouble with ratings or perception.

Wow. So you make "revenge" votes, and sometimes vote people down "because you're in a bad mood"? Sounds like what comes around, goes around.

Wow. So you make "revenge" votes, and sometimes vote people down "because you're in a bad mood"? Sounds like what comes around, goes around.

It really does. However, my reasoning for voting that person down was more than just a bad mood. After that, I appeared to have made several enemies, who wait for me to make one of my lesser quality posts and then rate me down for them. This is just speculation.

Personally I think the system gets used too often. When two people get in an argument, the person people agree with gets rated up and the person people disagree with gets rated down. Someone said that a 10-12 year old should not be doing programming or something of the sort, and got a -1 rating. I thought they raised a good point, but I still disagreed with them in my own opinion and got a +3 rating out of it.

I think rating me down once or twice or three times might have been enough to let me know that the community disagreed with me rating the guy down, or disagreed with one or two of my posts. But I have been rated down a bunch of time with some of those people simply walking into a thread and rating down all of my posts in it.

Well, I wouldn't know.. but that's what you said in your OP.

This is how I vote:

• I usually don't rate someone down if the person has more than 3 downvotes. The point has been made.
• I wouldn't have downrated your original post. Useless advice (where there is no information) is one thing, and it can be ignored. Bad advice is worse.
• I would have downrated your post about the ratings. It doesn't belong in those threads and only derails.

Maybe you're thinking about this way too much? It's just a number. It doesn't reflect you as a person in any way. I think the reputation graphs and the focus on it is a bit exagurated, but I guess it's a way to keep people around and getting them to use the system. Like a reward.

The thing is, people are rating for different reasons (which isn't necessarily bad, because overall users cover the entire ground of good reasons).

I often rate based off attitude, even if someone is technically wrong, I rate people up for trying to be helpful (regardless of whether it actually ended up being helpful), and then I rate them up again when they have a friendly response when someone else explains why their technical advice was misleading or inaccurate. I also rate up the person correcting them, if the correction was polite and friendly.

I rate people up for mentioning or linking to things that I've never heard of that are interesting to me, even if it ends up being overall unrelated to the thread's topic.

On other occasions, if someone's technical advice is so wrong it could potentially mislead someone in a really negative way, I downvote it not to punish the poster but to flag to newer programmers who might be reading the thread that the contents of that post is inaccurate.

Casually mistaken information I often upvote, thanking the poster for participating and for trying to be helpful.

I also downvote people if they behave like absolute jerks - but, thankfully, that's really rare on this forum.

My upvoting to downvoting are probably 20:1 or higher.

A simple upvote or downvote can't always accurately convey the message I think I'm conveying - people might interpret a downvote to me something other than what I am trying to say.

I, and others as well, actively upvote to counter-act downvotes that we feel were overly underserved.

Maybe you're thinking about this way too much? It's just a number. It doesn't reflect you as a person in any way. I think the reputation graphs and the focus on it is a bit exagurated, but I guess it's a way to keep people around and getting them to use the system. Like a reward.

It's because I'm in a college which teaches technology, communication, and being a good online citizen. One of the things I read in a course gave me the interpretation that I should try to be a modern pioneer of technology. And whenever there is a problem in communication or online communication which I'm a part of somehow, I feel like I should fix it, if I can.

These are the reasons why I care way too much :).

I think the reputation graphs and the focus on it is a bit exagurated, but I guess it's a way to keep people around and getting them to use the system. Like a reward.

It has also massively cleaned up the forums as a whole; before the original rating system came into place even the technical threads tended to be pretty lawless places at times... then the rating system was brought in and pretty much over night the overall quality in the forums shot up and has pretty much stayed there for the past N years since it was introduced.

As much as people might dislike it when it negatively impacts them overall the impact on the site as a whole has been very positive indeed.