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I saw a situation today where a post was answered by 6 different people. One of the users who posted an answer, the highest voted answer, decided to comment on each of the other answers asking for each of them to upvote the others' answers.

To me, this seems like it would be frowned upon from the community and mods. I see this as a very minimal variation of fraud, as upvotes are supposed to signify usefulness to the user voting, not just as a reward for the users posting, and especially not as an empty reward. I have links to the post and pictures but do not want to single out anyone in case there's nothing wrong with it. I'm not looking to blast anyone, just genuinely curious.

Update:

Upon further reading, it appears the comment was made as a joke, kind of. The post is related to redundancy and it looks like the comment was made on all answers in an attempt to be redundant, which isn't necessarily any better. The comments have been deleted but it still doesn't answer my question of how the community feels about something of this nature...

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What I can say is, it's only comments possibly meant as a joke and not an actual case of voting fraud. And since people don't necessarily like being told what to do, I'm sure most people won't care to upvote others' answers that way.

And flag such comments as no longer needed. Enough flags will remove them without requiring a moderator's attention.

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Doesn't sound particularly worrisome to me. The comments you saw were maybe not useful (probably why they were deleted), but it's not like posting a comment asking for upvotes on certain answers (if I'm understanding this correctly?) is anything like, say, using sock-puppets to upvote or downvote answers. Leaving a comment doesn't affect the score of an answer or force people to vote one way or another. To say more I'd have to know the context.

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  • I have pictures of the context but it would technically be calling someone out, which I'm trying to avoid. The exact comment was "If each of us up-votes all the other answers, this might not be such a disaster. I'll start and come back to delete this comment later."
    – Hank
    Commented Feb 28, 2017 at 22:12
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    @Hank: It's a weird comment, that's for sure. But I don't see why anyone would be influenced by it to commit voting fraud. People usually don't upvote answers that they don't agree with, even if someone leaves a comment suggesting it
    – herisson
    Commented Feb 28, 2017 at 22:26
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    @Hank: Do you have any sense of what was wrong with the question and/or answers that might have led the commenter to conclude that the situation was at risk of being "such a disaster"? Was this one of those single-word requests where multiple people give the same answer within minutes of each other?
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Feb 28, 2017 at 22:50
  • @SvenYargs No, all the answers were different. I think there were other comments that maybe would have shed some light on the situation, had they not been deleted. I saw some comments that were obvious replies, but nothing was there to reply to.
    – Hank
    Commented Mar 1, 2017 at 2:03

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