Exchange votes or favours

Question

Probably the most risky post I ever posted on AU, nevertheless need to get it of my chest...

Don't ask me how I got the impression, nor whom it involves, but there seems to be a tendency lately that people "exchange" favours.

No one on AU has any objection to an occasional sympathizing vote, nor with an upvote just because of the work that might have been involved in writing an answer.
I do object however strongly to a structural exchange of favours. Probably just inside the limits of what the system allows and detects. I don't like it, even resent it and I don't do it.

Please, please don't publicly upvote someone, often on multiple posts at once, as an obvious "present", probably even without having read the answer(s). Just hoping someone will return the favour as a result. It is cheap, bad for the voting system and bad for the site.

If you vote, vote for the quality of an answer or question. Nothing more, nothing less.

Answer 1

My two cents;

Don't browse users, browse questions.

If you're genuinely enthusiast about a user's post, upvote it. Comments shouldn't be used for that, but if from time you time you like a post so much that you feel like letting the user know that you liked it, you won't be pilloried for that.

You shouldn't be serial upvoting a user. Really, don't serial upvote users.

I'm a bit afraid to write the following, because serial upvotes shouldn't be tolerated. I'd like the following to be a good reading for those who bindingly decided they're going to do that regardless already. If you really feel like a user deserves more reputation and you can't be stopped from upvoting more than one user's post, at least please do that under the following constraints:

• Absolutely, check out the validity of the posts. No one will pillory you for having upvoted deserving posts, but they'll do if you upvote crap (virtually, technically they can't know).
• If it's an answer, check out also the other answers to the same question, and upvote also all the other useful answers (and downvote crappy answers). That is, at least change your serial upvote to a "serial objective review of Q/As".

And don't let the user know you just serially upvoted their posts. As Jacob and others already said, it just looks fishy and no one likes it.

Finally, if you're upvoting / serially upvoting a user hoping for a return, I'm sorry to say you're here for all the wrong reasons.

Rep is nice, indeed, but what's really nice is a great post. The idea behind voting is primarily to shape the number on the left of the post; in that view, reputation is a just a side effect of that. When voting, you should be focusing only on making that number reflect the validity of the post.

Consider that by doing that well, users' reputation will start to reflect the overall validity of their posts with the best approximation possible.

Answer 2

I do object however strongly to a structural exchange of favours. Probably just inside the limits of what the system allows and detects.

A big issue here is that the system for detecting this has a couple of really basic flaws, which cause it to miss votes on a regular basis and which make it a bit too obvious what those limits are.

I've written a query to identify votes that were overlooked because of these flaws, and am currently running it against past voting data; 192 users were affected, most by only a few votes but some by hundreds - those people greatly affected by this I've sent messages in preparation for some consternation.

This correction should be completed in about an hour; hopefully it puts a stop to the worst of this behavior in the future.

Answer 3

OK, to spice up the discussion I disagree with your premise: " don't publicly upvote someone, often on multiple posts at once, as an obvious "present""

If upvoting multiple answers from a helpful user is done to reward the user for being helpful, that is absolutely fine. Even more: it is why this site has a reward system... not just to encourage good content, but give good content producers recognition.

I do it from time to time. When someone leaves a super helpful comment, I find a good(!) answer given by the user and upvote it.

That said, this is, as with all morality, a matter of intentionality. If you have the intention to 'receive' votes following your upvotes, that is just daft.