Is upvoting new users out of pity allowed?

Question

What I mean is if a new user posts a "bad" question or answer, is it okay to upvote them so they won't feel discouraged or anything like that? Now I wouldn't do this myself, and I assume it's not allowed, but I saw a question with an obvious reason for having a downvote, but it was upvoted, so I wanted to make sure.

Comments

I don't know about everyone else, but I think it should be allowed.

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Even if we decided to not allow it, how are we supposed to enforce a rule like this?

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https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/meta/76061/psa-regarding-voting Read the first huge headline.

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Absolutely not I’d assume

Honestly, I wish more was done about people upvoting downvoted posts when they obviously deserved the downvote. It’s one thing is the person genuinely thinks it wasn’t worth the downvote/deserves an upvote, but the whole upvoting to cancel a downvote is irritating

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Well okay, now that I've been here for sometime I change my mind. I don't think we should upvote new users out of pity but still treat them as if they are a regular user who should know what they're doing.

Answer 1

I would discourage you from doing that. Please think of votes less a way to reward people or give them points, and more as a way to indicate correct/ useful posts to people who visit in the future.

Up-voting bad posts gives a false message, both to the people reading the thread and to the person who made the post. If the post is bad, we want them to try harder.

However, if you want to do this in spite of the above, you're welcome. You can do whatever you like with your votes, as long as it's not targeted toward individual people. As sumwun mentioned, it's unreasonable for us to go chasing people about who they voted all the time.

Comments

Okay, thanks, that's what I thought.

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Or you could leave a comment telling them you upvoted to encourage them.

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Please don't do that -- it sends a false message about the post *and* it creates clutter.