-7

Situation: 1) I am an expert software professional 2) I recently found superuser.com from a search engine, because I found a particular Q&A useful

Desire: 1) Vote the two answers as useful

Problem: I am not allowed to because I have to EARN reputation.

Question: As in real life, if we assume the people we meet are reputable, then they do something that causes their reputation to sink, it's understandable when we change our attitude about them.

At superuser.com, why do we have to earn the right to vote? Why not make this same assumption on superuser.com, and if enough people think someone's reputation is bad, their votes can be removed?

0

5 Answers 5

Reset to default
15

As @Cor and @Ngu already stated: we don't want people to game the system or use it to spam, so there's a threshold to prevent them from doing so.

However, it only takes one good answer and/or question to receive enough rep to be able to upvote. If you also have a Stack Exchange or Stack Overflow account where you already have some rep, you can associate them and receive a +100 rep bonus to your Super User account (given that the original has more than 200 rep).

In the end though, we want our users to participate and built up their own reputation for being competent here. I wouldn't know how to assess your worth in rep based on your current real life situation. And as long as you give high quality answers, you shouldn't have to worry either!

9

I'm new as well, and discovered the site similarly to the situation you present... however I can understand the desire to limit upvoting to 'vested' accounts. Otherwise it will be gamed in ways harmful to the community. Read the FAQ.

Also this topic is likely more appropriate for https://meta.superuser.com/

7

There is a small reputation threshold before one can vote, which is 15. This enables most users to start voting on items very quickly, and prevents new sockpuppet accounts with no real contribution from voting a particular user up.

6

That's because we don't want people to simply register many accounts and start voting themselves up.

3

In reputation systems where creating new identities is free, votes by newly created identities must hold zero weight; otherwise the system is vulnerable to Sybil attacks.

In theory it would be possible to still allow such users to vote, and only count their votes once they collect enough reputation, but it would probably cause much confusion for little benefit.

You must log in to answer this question.