How is it helping Superuser to prevent me from being able to vote up / down comments?

Question

Genuine question. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been using this forum for several years, and constructively contributing every time. Do Superuser maybe need to employ some better UX staff to help solve the problem of trolls and unhelpful users skewing voting in unconstructive way? It's really annoying and makes me feel less of a sense of respect and belonging here. I want to be able to vote up and down answers. What kind of marathon do I have to do to earn that privilege?

Wow. I can't even post this question without creating a relevant tag "Superuser" which I'm not allowed to do because I don't have enough reputation. This is driving users away. It's the most militant rules I've seen in a forum, disempowering and cultish.

Answer 1

The idea behind not being able to vote on accounts with little reputation has a few reasons.

1. Spambots will abuse the system to create fake posts and use other accounts to vote up questions so their post gets more attention. Due to the sheer volume of users visiting the site per minute, its not doable to moderate this.

2. Not being able to do something, but learning that with a little bit of contribution to the site, one will be able to actually do more stuff, is a great way to get people to contribute.

The more you do on a site and the more powers you get, the more users are willing to do so.

3. Learning the ropes works best if few skills are added at a time. If you have the full set of tools available from the start, you don't learn how to use them well. But if you earn a subset of tools every now and then, you far better learn why you got them, how to use them and even more importantly, how not to use them.

With voting, you give rep for voting up, but you lose rep when voting down. This is important to learn and if you get all the tools, you won't understand the power behind it, but by getting access to them one step at a time, you understand when it is still a good idea to vote down even if it costs you points, and it also helps to make quality posts and answers which is the whole goal of this site.

Answer 2

Do Superuser maybe need to employ some better UX staff to help solve the problem of trolls and unhelpful users skewing voting in unconstructive way?

There are already (at least some) measures taken to curb this, particularly time between votes and other actions on the same question. However, community members also help moderate these activities, which is why it is important to have an established user base.

It's really annoying and makes me feel less of a sense of respect and belonging here. I want to be able to vote up and down answers. What kind of marathon do I have to do to earn that privilege?

It certainly can be frustrating to feel excluded or to simply not know the requirements for specific privileges. You can check out the total amount of reputation required to perform certain actions here. In your case, you need a total of 15 rep for upvotes and total of 125 rep for downvotes.

The primary way to gain reputation is by posting your own questions/answers and having people upvote them (you get 10 rep per upvote currently). So, to plug these numbers into the "real" world, this means that on one account (ex. the one you are using now), you need to post any combination of one or more questions or answers which a total of 2 people upvote (20 rep) to gain the ability to upvote others and 13 people upvote (11 more, counting the initial 2 people before) to gain the ability to downvote others.

---

If you are a low-rep user, you can also gain reputation through other actions (such as suggesting question/answer edits and having them approved), but this isn't as effective at gaining rep as having people vote on your questions/answers.

---

Wow. I can't even post this question without creating a relevant tag "Superuser" which I'm not allowed to do because I don't have enough reputation.

You can select existing tags as well, which is typically more relevant than creating your own.

This is driving users away. It's the most militant rules I've seen in a forum, disempowering and cultish.

To be fair, some of the reputation amounts don't make much sense to my mind. But in the long run, assuming you aren't creating disposable accounts each time you visit, the reputation requirements fade into the background fairly quickly (in my experience). In any case, if you really use Stack Exchange, it becomes less of a problem over time and Stack Exchange seems unlikely to be changing their policies in the near future.