Even if it just gets a few upvotes, it is still likely to show up when people search the forum or read all of the posts under a particular tag. Arguably, those are the readers you care most about, since they are most likely to be working in the area you’re writing about.
There tends to be a winner-take-all effect for post upvotes. Perhaps it makes sense to assess quality according to log(upvotes)? A post with 100 upvotes is probably not 10x as good as a post with 10 upvotes. It just happened to hit the frontpage at a time when there was little competition or something like that.
This is a more general problem with social media. Many users are either getting more attention than they want, or less attention than they want. It should really be called “DIY broadcast media”, not “social media”.
Even if it just gets a few upvotes, it is still likely to show up when people search the forum or read all of the posts under a particular tag. Arguably, those are the readers you care most about, since they are most likely to be working in the area you’re writing about.
There tends to be a winner-take-all effect for post upvotes. Perhaps it makes sense to assess quality according to log(upvotes)? A post with 100 upvotes is probably not 10x as good as a post with 10 upvotes. It just happened to hit the frontpage at a time when there was little competition or something like that.
This is a more general problem with social media. Many users are either getting more attention than they want, or less attention than they want. It should really be called “DIY broadcast media”, not “social media”.