How to find good nodes

Almost every noder with 100+ XP has written at least one really good node. So all you have to do is go to Other Users, click on someone, and read their 'highest ranked' nodes. More often than not, you'll get your money's worth.

However, I think that there are 3 types of good nodes:

1. Nodes that everyone likes, which will probably be very highly ranked if they are good, so you can't lose there. Just follow the above instructions.
2. Esoteric nodes. These are nodes few people understand, because they are more profound than most regular nodes, so people tend to ignore them (sometimes even downvote them). However, if you are lucky, one or two people understood them, and they are therefore cool!ed. They can usually be found in the lower parts of the highest reputation first listing, with a C!
   (If you have never run into, or want an example of such a node, see my what E2 is all about node.)
3. Nodes that piss you off. I admit it. I love reading nodes that are insensitive or stupid, because, well, they trigger some emotion in me. And just sometimes, these nodes get you thinking about stuff in a different perspective. However, as most badly voted nodes really suck, I go only for the ones which are high on the lowest reputation first, with a C!. This means that somebody thought it worthwhile, so it is not just a my dog's name node, but it REALLY pissed people off.

Have fun.

Finding good nodes, it is like, finding a good movie, in a video store. You walk in there and you are so set to rent one of those amazing new releases you've been hearing about, with the catchy title and some famous actor, or an ingenius plot line. And then, you are staring and you're thinking, I've seen that one a million times over, I know I have but.. then, you are drawn, oddly, to the older section. To the forgotten film of yesterday, the old ones, not the classics, the standards, no, just.. some random movie that you have never seen. The title does not send shivers down your spine, you are not instantly impressed by a jacket layout that your younger sibling could have thrown together but..

you take a chance.

And you cry, or you laugh, or you feel, so hard, so much more than you ever have before.. or it is really awful, and you wish you'd picked up the latest Tom Cruise flick.

My point is, buried beneath the crap, overshadowed by some twisted popularity contest, there is so much achingly beautiful text on this god damn web site. There is no really great way to find it.. you just have to close your eyes, click, and hope for the best.

Although using reputation alone as a guide to good nodes works well it has a few problems :

• Not all good wus have very high rep. Particularly if they are recent or about slightly obscure subjects.
• Some nodes have higher rep than other, possibly better, nodes simply because they have been around for longer.
• Particularly for lower level users it may only yield a few really good writeups.
• Not all nodes with a C! are good.

Of course this depends on what you class as a good node. You could define "good" in any number of ways but the common feature (as far as I'm concerned) that all good nodes have is that they are well written regardless of their subject matter. So one way to find good nodes is to find good noders

But how to find good noders?

Until comparatively recently it was difficult but now there is a way thanks to the Honor Roll. All you need to do is find a user with a high merit.

Now unfortunately merit isn’t a public statistic so you can’t see a users merit on their homenode but… you can see the effect of their LF.

So to find a good user and hence find good nodes all you need to do is surf through the other users nodelet and find someone who has significantly fewer wus than the number set for their level.

For example: a user who is level 3 and yet only has 36 wus (as opposed to the required 70) has got a LF under 0.52 and therefore has a merit of at least 19 so they must be doing something right!

Once you have found such a user all you need to do is sit back and read everything they have written, knowing you will get quality writing.

I think the best thing about this method is that it not only provides you with lots of good stuff but it also gets you to read stuff you wouldn’t normally have searched for. This way you can learn a lot about things that you aren’t usually interested in and that, I think, is what this site is all about.