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The voting in Askubuntu works as following:

you ask a good question, it gets upvoted and you get reputation
you give a good answer and it gets upvoted, you receive reputation

you ask a bad question, it gets downvoted, and you lose reputation you give a bad answer and it gets downvoted, you lose reputation

The reputation system works pretty good:

  • It is pretty easy to gain reputation
  • you see the reputation of others
  • there are a lot of new users with 1 reputation on the site

following from that you get a feeling of being better then the other person, which automatically makes you want to ask good questions, not disrespect anyone(rep. loss), etc.

However in meta you don't receive reputation if asking a good question.
(i don't know about downvoting)
because of this the only purpose voting serves is ranking of questions, but you don't have a list of best ranked questions (they are shown sorted by time) and most people won't see the purpose of helping the community anymore.

So what point exactly does voting in Meta serve and why don't we gain reputation from upvotes? (should i add feature request?)

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  • There is a list of best ranked questions. Click the 'Questions' button in the main menu and select 'votes' to the top right of the questions list. Questions will be sorted by # of votes.
    – Daniel
    Oct 12, 2015 at 0:42
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    I would say: your question is a good one, but lots of people downvoted (including me) just to show you that it's good not to lose any rep while posting meta questions... ;-)
    – Fabby
    Oct 13, 2015 at 21:44

1 Answer 1

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Meta isn't rep gaining. Never has been never should be.

The point of voting tends to be to show agreement or disagreement with a given thread or answer. There are many "make a collective decision" threads which exist and then general agreement or disagreement can be met through voting or such. That's the purpose really for votes on meta.

For feature requests it's the same general thing, in my opinion.

Meta should not affect your rep, either, in my opinion. It's a site about the main site. I think you should only gain rep for contributing to the main site, not contributing to a site about the main site.

If you really care, there's badges which you can earn for contributing here. However, your reputation should only be gained by contributions to the actual main site. Not meta.

3
  • yes, but wouldn't rep gain (we could scale it down) help more people to be active in meta?
    – this.foo
    Oct 11, 2015 at 15:43
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    @this.foo Meta is linked to the main account rep. I'm of the wholehearted opinion that if you're going to participate in the main site and wish to contribute to Meta you can, but you do so only for the knowledge that you DID contribute to Meta. Rep changes should only be done by actual contribution to the main site, not Meta, in my opinion
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Oct 11, 2015 at 16:21
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    @this.foo: you can earn badges on Meta to award your active participation.
    – Takkat
    Oct 11, 2015 at 16:44

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