This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.
Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.
To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.
Reddit also had it. I don't frequent other forums that use voting, but a forum I used to be part of had a user that would delve into the history of people he disagreed with and report year-old comments to get those people banned.
Given that it's an easy way to hinder "opponents" I very much doubt it's LW exclusive.
Apart from willingness to use tools others would think immoral, no. I also don't think we need to go that far as an explanation. You only need one person doing it in a community as small as this one for it to become noticeable.
Ya know the funny thing is, I instinctively came here to upvote your reply. I suspect I would have done that even if you're reply was of poor quality. Perhaps that could be construed as a form of retributive upvoting, in gratitude for the courtesy of replying. In that case, I would intuit that it is not of good practice, since it would equally skew the karma system (unless everyone is doing it, I suppose). Though, karma isn't ahhh...can't remember the economic term...replaceable by another unit of karma. There is a marginal value to karma and very different signals for negative/positive karma.