Community stance on solliciting for reputation

Question

I have recently commented a few times on users explicitly asking for upvotes and accepted answer reputation points. I understand the drive that the reputation points system gives, but it is starting to become a bit too much.

What is our stance towards asking for these reputation increases? What are the pros and cons of enforcing a policy where these requests are not allowed?

Ultimately the reputation points are a part of this site, used to show which users contribute the most meaningful content, as judged independently by the users. IMHO allowing vote canvassing skews this aspect towards the most aggressive repvote collectors.

Your opinions please...

Answer 1

Indeed - I would suggest flagging those comments as "No longer needed" or "Something else", and we can remove them from the site. If they are in the body of the post, they should be edited out.

I don't mind the occasional comment on an answer along the lines of "If this helped, please consider marking it as an answer and upvoting" especially if the question was from a new user who'd commented "Thanks, that's it!".

You're right that the gameification of these sites can promote a feeling of "needing the points", but we would like to be meaningful within the context of our small corner of the internet. Clearly I'm saying this from a position of privilege as a long term user with a large number of contributions.

It can seem arbitrary when some identification questions (for example) get a number of up-votes and others don't before they are answered, but I do try and upvote even slightly older ident questions when the question is of merit (i.e. reasonable photo, good description of the element, etc.) as well as the answer locating it.