Lower the bar for voting

answered 2014-10-22 12:42:51 +0000

Adaephon
2299 ●3 ●16 ●42

At the moment there seem to be 24587 users on this site. Seem to be, because most of these accounts are inactive. And yes, only 345 of them (slightly more than 1.4 %) may vote. Changing the requirement from 10 karma to 2 karma would allow another 67 users (slightly more than 0.27 %) to vote, not changing much when compared to the number of all users (still 98.3 % are unable to vote).

Another way to see it is that already over 80 % percent of all users that have more than the minimum of 1 karma point are able to vote.

As new user you can reach 11 karma with one single upvote to any of your questions or answers. Even 16 if your answer is just accepted. So I think the bar for voting is already ridiculously low.

The only way - barring down-votes - to even get to a karma score between 1 and 11 is by accepting an answer, for which 2 karma points are awarded. And I do not think that it should be possible to essentially award oneself voting permissions easily (or any permission for that matter).

As for the permissions to post links. I agree that it could probably be lowered a bit without "bad things"™ happening. But there are ways to post URLs without them being made to links automatically and usually someone with edit permissions will fix them. (At least I do, after checking the destination). I would not drop the requirement entirely, as the occasional spam message is bad enough without there being actual links in them.

answered 2014-10-22 15:47:16 +0000

ANOKNUSA
536 ●3 ●11 ●20

I would have to concur with Adaephon. I fail to see how allowing more people to silently click a link would result in more discussion. I reached enough karma to vote and post links in a couple days, and I did it by asking a single interesting question and answering a few others.

I can think of two reasons as to why traffic here might be low. These are based on the two categories of posters I've seen here most often:

• Most of the questions I've answered come from people who haven't read the User's Guide, and seem to assume i3 is capable of/designed for something it is not.

• Some of the posters clearly don't understand what i3 is prior to installing it. i3 almost seems to be the "gateway" tiling window manager of choice, and there seem to be a lot of people who install i3 before they've discerned the difference between a desktop environment like GNOME and a stand-alone, tiling window manager like i3. Hence they ask quite a few questions not directly related to the window manager, not understanding that setting wallpapers/connecting to networks/configuring printing/tweaking fonts/auto-mounting drives/changing icons and themes/whatever does not fall within the window manager's purview.

There's some overlap between those groups, but it seems to me that these two groups of posters produce two kinds of people: Those who read the documentation after asking something here, and learn everything they need to know from it; and those who conclude that i3 just isn't for them. In both cases, their activity here ceases. This isn't necessarily a bad thing---good documentation is one of the stated goals of the i3 developers, and the realization of that goal pretty much makes this forum obsolete. Nearly everything else---that stuff not related to i3---can be discovered via a search engine, or the wiki/forums of one's distro of choice.