3 ms·

Appeal to authority based on points.

• dctoedt 6y ago
  And your appeal is to what, exactly? Answer: It's to the "authority" of an opinion offered by an unidentified newcomer, with no indication why the rest of us shouldn't dismiss the opinion as unhelpful noise. In contrast, points and longevity serve as a rough, very-democratic measure of a poster's cumulative contributions to the community here, and thus (indirectly) of how well the poster has grokked the local cultural norms. That, in turn, gives readers useful information about the weight that they might wish to consider giving to the view(s) expressed by the poster. (Apropos of which: I see that you still have a total of -1 points for the all of five days that your account has been active.)