Purpose of voting
Could someone explain the purpose of voting? It's the only forum where I've come across this practice.
6 Answers
Before voting was introduced many years ago now, we discussed it and at first I was against the idea.
I have since changed my mind - at least it shows that someone probably read your post - before voting.
It doesn't hurt anything, and for some of us it serves as a tiny additional motivator. We vote our thanks for help and our appreciation of each other's contributions. It helps to impart a sense of community.
I look forward to 4000 reps: less advertising.
A bit less mercenary: I derive value from what people say here; I try to return value with entertaining posts. Votes are a rough but useful indication of what things succeed.
When you reach certain points targets, the mods send you prizes. For the first 5,000 rep they send you vouchers for your local shopping mall. At 10,000 it's a steak dinner. 20,000 gets you a mini-break to a Spanish-speaking country of your choosing. 50,000 is a week in an all-expenses-paid-for luxury resort. Personally, I can't wait for 100,000, because that's a car !!
All of which is complete lies, by the way.
In truth, I guess it's just a simple way of encouraging folk to continue to participate in the forum as they watch their points grow, a bit like some folk treat Facebook as they watch their number of 'friends' grow and accumulate more and more 'likes' for posts that they've shared...
In Britain there's a TV games show presenter called Bruce Forsyth, aka 'Brucie', who I believe is now about 170 years old (he was already very elderly when I first saw him on telly as a kid). He uses a catchphrase (I'm not sure if he actually coined it himself or plagiarised it from another game show):
Brucie to audience: What do points make ?
Audience to Brucie: Prizes !!!
The one thing I can think of is that with voting you get to see the best answers first. In my opinion this is a great idea for the Q&A section because some people have better answers than others to issues like grammar questions. And for those seeking answers it's faster to see the best answers at the top of the list.
Voting for games, however, is a different situation in my view because much of the time there really isn't a clear "best answer" and voting is so subjective. One of the biggest factors is you tend to get more votes if you answer earlier rather than later. Some issues attract more votes than others. This all has nothing to do with the quality of the entry. So voting on games has sullied my SD experience and I wish this site would get rid of voting on games. Maybe the administrators feel that we all get addicted to voting so we'll keep participating. I don't know.
At least you don't get any money or love for votes. So I'm not missing out on all that much...well, that's what I tell myself when I get upset with the voting 
.
The votes get you badges.
You can sell your badges on e-bay!
Or, if you're lucky, you may win a prize.. ( o possibly not, I'm losing heart).
