It’s not a request to upvote—it’s a statement of approval. And as per Why our kind can’t cooperate, vacuous statements of approval or agreement are upvote-worthy, if only because of their rarity.
An even better idea would be to send the author a private message in appreciation; that wouldn’t decrease the signal-to-noise ratio but would have the same positive reinforcement effect.
Everyone goes into those threads primed to be friendly to the other people, because they are all members of the same fan-fiction reading in-group. There is also a shift from “on a rationality site” mode to “talking about media” mode, where rigor in voting rationale tends to become somewhat more lax. I don’t mind, but I’m part of the in-group so that’s to be expected.
Why is a request to upvote being upvoted?
It’s not a request to upvote—it’s a statement of approval. And as per Why our kind can’t cooperate, vacuous statements of approval or agreement are upvote-worthy, if only because of their rarity.
An even better idea would be to send the author a private message in appreciation; that wouldn’t decrease the signal-to-noise ratio but would have the same positive reinforcement effect.
If you think this is bad you should see my comment on the hpmor thread that got upvoted 12 points for just agreeing with the parent
Yeah, http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/topcomments/ is always full of comments in HPMOR discussions. (As of now, only one of this week’s top ten comments is not in a HPMOR thread.) It bothers the hell out of me.
Everyone goes into those threads primed to be friendly to the other people, because they are all members of the same fan-fiction reading in-group. There is also a shift from “on a rationality site” mode to “talking about media” mode, where rigor in voting rationale tends to become somewhat more lax. I don’t mind, but I’m part of the in-group so that’s to be expected.
On the plus side, if that thread has a lot of new people drawn by HPMOR, so we may not want to subject them to such stringent standards.
On the other hand, I think we upvote (orrather, don’t downvote enough) in the rest of LW too much anyway.
Because someone wants to see more comments like that?