Deals.Woot

@s21: The way I see it, if a deal is bad I won't upvote it. I don't downvote bad deals, I just don't vote on them at all.

EDIT: and I don't see any deals on the popular tab that aren't decent deals as of this moment...

Regarding reputation, I don't think an imaginary number that only matters to one person is more important than getting bad deals off the frontpage
Having a black triangle didn't save me from the downvote faeries when I posted an unpopular opinion

@devexityspace: Why not? Why would woot design it so that you're punished for voting down bad deals?

@lifevirusx: downvoting does not negatively affect wooters from a design-aspect at all. I just reserve my downvotes for shady merchants like:

@liquidationshow
@Dollardealsclub
@twelvedeals

etc, etc. =D

@devexityspace: Saw the one you're talking about. It would be nice if folks noted the lite (or prime shipping, ect.) in the description.

Are any of them still posting? I thought they had moved on to other pastures.

I honestly don't vote unless I know that it's a good deal from a decently reputable site. If I've never heard of the website selling the item, I do a domain search and if it doesn't check out, I'll post the information in the comment section to let others know. If it does and it's a good deal, upvote placed.

I'm fine with eBay deals as long as they meet the necessary criteria for being posted here, and I always check them out.

I'm totally tired of the free ebook deals, and the overall quality of deals seems to have taken a significant nosedive in the last several months.

I don't know if any of this is attributable to the coupons jumbowoot so generously sends out or not; it could be just increased traffic as the site becomes better known.

Well, you can probably count me among those who have posted more in the past few months, but I don't think I've posted garbage. Just after Thanksgiving I noticed the little triangle and saw that mine was purple (with no idea what that meant). Until then I hadn't paid much attention the deals.woot, other than to check the sponsored deals and the first page or two of popular ones. I might have posted one or two, but had never even looked at questions. The first JumboWoot coupon I got made me look up and pay attention, but I know how easily I get swept up in something like this so I've tried to be careful. I did let myself get caught up in looking for and posting deals, and once I noted the questions, and that they aren't just deal related, I got more interested. I have noticed more negative comments, downvotes, and general nastiness of comments than were here before Christmas, but I'm trying to build a thicker skin. With so much going on at work, I might have to cut back soon, anyway. :(

I might be unpopular for this, but I'm really sick of the free sample deals, free pizza deals, as well as the free ebooks. I fell for the samples 3 times long ago (never received any of them). They get 100s of votes, 80% of which are bandwagon. People seem to now post deals that the vast majority of the woot population would never be interested in. But its FREE/silly cheap so everyone votes for it, but no one buys/signs up for it.

Which reminds me, rawr hate bandwagon voting rawr rawr meow.

It's tough though, because some of those are legitimately good deals. I'm not professing any real solution, so I guess that means I'm just whining. /shrug.

@okham:
[Cont....]
Seeing that there is a person behind the company and that it's based here in the good ol' USA, complete with phone number and mailing address would make me feel secure. I've also seen a few deals where the site was based in China, meaning I did what I could to let others know about it and ask the poster if he/she/it could vouch for the retailer. If he/she/it can, and seems to not necessarily work for them, then I'm more trusting of the company. Of course, I'm not as active on the deals side as I should be, so you're not likely to find many of these things from me, but I suppose it's time to start getting back over there policing the streets of Woot (in case you didn't know, I'm Batman)

I see woot as having more users these days, hence a lot of the additional/new voters.

I don't believe coupons are the culprit, I think it's the never-ending mire of gaining/keeping reputations. It seems that most posted deals, up & down votes, answers & comments are made (or not made) to enhance a person's rep. Sad to me. Coupons are wonderful, but they do not entice me to be an active member.

@shrdlu: I am always pleasantly surprised by your answers & insight. Thank you for taking the time to educate newer people like me! It is appreciated more than I can say. Would like to ask you why you think 'questions have less effect on reps.' Does that statement go back more than 6 months? Or are you saying it's recent? Asking because I have found that if you don't ask a question every 7 days your rep plumments. Ergo, we have the silly, rep-building inane questions. Caveat: Do NOT mean this one.

One more thing. What is Jumbo Woot? I check woot, home woot, kids woot sold out woot and wine woot every day. Where is Jumbo Woot? Thanks for your help; evidently, I need it!

@gmwhit: Since you asked, I've noticed that although I would normally expect my reputation to swiftly drop, considering how little activity I've had over on the Deals side (including voting, or commenting), and that I have asked very few questions (my last was about a month ago), I can only conclude that my remaining at the current percentage is due to two things, strongly interrelate.

One, I vote a lot of comments up. I vote some questions up. I ignore most of the random "question for question's sake" questions, unless it strikes me as something that might interest me. I try to be helpful.

Two, everyone else is still working overtime on those "questions" I just mentioned, and it dilutes their activity. I noticed about a week ago that my precipitous drop was not occurring, even though I'd expected it, and saw that different things were affecting people.

Post good deals. Vote up other good deals, and comments. Stay away from the seduction of downvoting. Simple.

But reputation has been the basis for coupons before, just as posting deals and asking questions et cetera. In addition, even though it doesn't matter to you, there definitely are people whose sole motivation for things is status, and for them, the black triangle means something. I myself only give a perfunctory amount of attention to it, but I do pay attention and maintain it.

In any case, I'm not convinced that the coupons are the prime motivation for more upvoting. I think that's almost entirely increased activity due to more traffic, and also because of the "Current Rank" tab, which allows people who never frequented the fresh tab to vote on new but not yet popular deals. Questions and deals being posted for the sake of posting them are likely up due to coupons, but the increased activity is really the fuel that's getting them to the front page. It seems like Woot! upped the requirements for Popularity to even this out a little, but it's not quite enough.

@stark: "reputation has been the basis for coupons before"
And that's a problem cause as shown above it just encourages people to post nonsense or upvote everything to farm reputation

I know you get a coupon once you get enough rep, but that's not tied to your triangle color because I had black a while ago and slipped to green at one point and the email directly referenced my green and how hard I had worked for it
So it's not just from having high rep, overall maybe, but not hovering at 9x

I've been wooting for 4 years and have 3 black box accounts but really never paid more than minimal attention to deals.woot until approximately one month ago. I feel that I can see both sides of this issue as the main reason I started to explore deals.woot was that people kept bragging on the regular woot sites about using their jumbowoot coupons.

Of course I stumbled on into the community discussions, threw caution to the wind and asked how to get coupons. Of course my question was summarily thrashed and I even asked a follow-up question as to whether I could delete my first question.

Even though I got bunches of down-votes on my first question, I still got a lot of nice responses (even jumbowoot popped in and welcomed me). People basically told me not to worry about the coupons and just try to integrate into the community. When I asked about the negative votes affecting my rep, people again told me not to worry about it and just try to be a useful contributor. (continued...)

@shrdlu: My fault for not being clear about the importance of questions in the rep calculations. I should have said if you want to remain in the 99% & the top 15, you must ask a question every 7 days. I'm an example of that - went from the top 15 (had been there for weeks), and dropped like a boulder when I didn't ask another question after 7 days. Now #50.

Perhaps a better example is @theoneill555:, she was ranked #1 for about a week. When she didn't ask a question after 7 days, she plummeted, too. Is now ranked #47. Immediate drop - which led to my conclusion that questions are, indeed, heavily weighted in the highest rankings.

Whether or not ANY of that matters is another issue. Just an observation on my part. IMO, questions should NOT be in the algorithm at all. But then, that's what the community relayed to snapster some time ago. He asked about chat, & then asked about questions - the community resoundingly said get rid of questions in rep calculations.

It does seem that sometimes the effect is larger at random too. I posted a question it had 22 upvotes and I had massive boost in rating then a few months later a question had almost 40 upvotes and my rating didnt move up much... It baffles me lol