Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? - Meta Stack Overflow most recent 30 from 2019-09-18T17:51:11Z 40 Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? Amogh 2014-07-02T19:13:35Z 2016-03-15T15:18:59Z <p>Some users post their questions/answers and tell their friends to upvote them in order to increase their reputation. Is this okay? If not, can we prevent it somehow, like with a reputation audit?</p> 2 Answer by Renan for Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? Renan 2014-07-02T19:19:27Z 2014-07-02T19:28:34Z <p>Developers tend to be antisocial creatures. Even if you have 100+ contacts among all the social networks you use combined, you'll probably only have a handful friends in your real life.</p> <p>Stack Overflow has an amount of active users that is quite more than a handful<sup>[citation needed]</sup>. I believe in nearly all cases any upvotes that are awarded based on friendship should be more than offset by downvotes awarded due to a question being half-assed. No need to worry too much about that.</p> <p>As gunr commented:</p> <blockquote> <p>Upvote on your own terms, not because someone else told you to do so.</p> </blockquote> 13 Answer by Servy for Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? Servy 2014-07-02T19:24:50Z 2014-07-02T19:24:50Z <p>Is it <em>not</em> acceptable to go around upvoting all of your friends' posts, no. Can we stop it...sometimes. We do what we can. Of course, sometimes the behavior isn't really distinguishable from real votes, but the mods and devs do what they can.</p> <p>If you suspect a particular user is committing some form of voting fraud, flag one of their posts and explain what you believe to be happening and what reason you have to believe that it's going on and someone will look into it.</p> 61 Answer by Brad Larson for Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? Brad Larson 2014-07-02T19:42:42Z 2016-03-15T15:18:59Z <p>We highly recommend that you not ask your friends to vote for your content simply because you were the one who left it. We do recognize that people will naturally tend to vote for people they know, and only step in when this becomes a bad enough problem that it is skewing votes on questions and answers. We even have a standard message that we send out about this, which I'll quote from here:</p> <blockquote> <p>We recently noticed a substantial number of votes on your account to or from specific users. While we encourage everyone to upvote great posts, the motivation for doing so needs to be anchored in the merits of the post, not the person who wrote it. This is just a reminder to please refrain from targeting specific users when voting.</p> <p>Stack Exchange works by ensuring that the best information rises to the top. Voting specifically for content that benefits your friends, family or colleagues unfairly skews that system, and continuing to do so can result in a lengthy suspension for all involved.</p> <p>The system has processes in place to detect various types of voting between groups of users, so if you know anyone who may be voting for your stuff in kind, please ask them to refrain before the system detects such activity and takes similar actions on their account.</p> <p>This is often just a simple misunderstanding, so no harm done. But continued activity of this sort can result in a prolonged suspension for all involved, so please let me know if you have any questions regarding this policy.</p> </blockquote> <p>As you can see, we try to nudge people in the right direction first, and only take more serious action if this persists. Tim Post <a href="" rel="nofollow noreferrer">has written about factors that can lead to targeted voting</a>, and we try to educate about this before assuming malice.</p> 4 Answer by Ian Ringrose for Is it OK to ask your friends to upvote your posts? Ian Ringrose 2014-07-02T22:16:01Z 2014-07-02T22:16:01Z <p>No, </p> <p>But it is OK to ask your friends to <strong>look</strong> at a question you have posted if you think they can answer it. </p> <p>Some of them may up vote the question, others may down vote it. I have done both when a friend has asked me to look at one of their questions.</p>