I had several votes in the poll, but no up-mods. I don't care about the karma, but I wanted the poll to have a chance of being seen. It was rapidly dropping off the "newest" page, and it needed up-votes, but I didn't want to ask for them.

This is the only compromise I could find. You may not see this as a problem, but I do, and this is the only solution I've found. If you have a better solution then I'd be interested to hear it.

If the idea is good you'll get the votes, if not too bad. Nobody is going to withhold the votes in order to not give you the karma. Polls usually don't get a lot of upvotes unless the poll subject is really good.

I appreciate your point of view, but I disagree with your conclusions. Let me explain.

  > If the idea is good you'll get the vote.

That's true of most submissions, but doesn't seem to be true of polls.

  > Nobody is going to withhold the votes in order to not give you the karma.

I think there will be people who vote and move on without thinking to upvote it. Because of that, I wanted to remind people to up-vote the submission.

However, there are people who resent being asked for up-votes, and I wanted to make sure they weren't annoyed by that. I don't want to annoy people gratuitously, and this is the technique I have. People who don't care about karma, whatever, won't care (mostly). People who do care about karma, whatever, have a means of punishing me for asking.

  > Polls usually don't get a lot of upvotes unless the poll subject is really good.

Exactly, that's why I wanted to ask for upmods - to buck that trend.

So here's a summary of my reasoning:

* Some people vote and move on without upmodding

* I want them to upmod so the item has a chance to get enough votes to be vaguely meaningful

* That means I need to ask for upmods

* Some people resent that, so I need some way they can punish me

* The "scapegoat comment" seems to satisfy that.

Interesting that informal karma bartering has struck up of its own accord. Probably a lot more goes on behind the scenes.

I really don't understand why people concern themselves at all with "karma". You can't spend it, you can't invest it, it doesn't enrich you, it doesn't help you achieve any goals (...that are worth achieving).

It's pretty much a high score in a video arcade.

And yet some people do. I'm not one of them.

As explained elsewhere, it's not really the karma, it's the being asked for up-mods. Some people resent that, and for them I provide a way to punish me.