Well, this is coming from a lowly level 6, but in my humble opinion, and in my rating, I rate people by if I think their question is honestly helpful, and how much effort they put into the answer based on the question. I know I have put almost an hour in research for some of the questions I have answered, like the one for "Where does the phrase "do you catch my drift?" come from?" that took a lot of time to find, and I spent a lot of time in research for that answer. So I rate people based on how helpful they are based on the question that was asked. I think as long as your fair with your ratings you don't necessarily need to be "picky" but just rate accordingly.

You shouldn't necessarily be more picky but you shouldn't necessarily be too much less picky, either. You can rate more as your level moves up, as I understand it, but you shouldn't be random about it or rate an answer or question because you like or do not like the person posting it. You should be objective and fair.

I find that I issue feedback for a variety of reasons: to acknowlege thoughtful, creative, or helpful postings, to compensate for troll damage, to lift the spirits of someone who seems down, and to acknowledge those who are really sharing something of themselves in an answer. The general "helpful" and "not helpful" categories are probably too restrictive, but they're better than any single-word alternatives I can think of. Generally I would say that I have become more picky about handing out positive ratings to those who are high on the leaderboard, mainly because I think the whole system tends to skew in their favor more than is merited -- because the folks with lots of points all know each other, there's a tendency to sort of "clique up" a bit. This cliquing isn't intentional, it's just human nature: people are comfortable with and feel positively toward those that they know and like. Nothing wrong with that, but it tends to make the "entry barrier" higher for new folk, whose participation may otherwise be just as good or better. So I try to avoid just constantly up-rating my friends -- something I did a lot more of when I started out here.