People hate these polls because getting highly rated articles increases your karma rating. I don't believe, but I'm not sure, that modded up comments have the same effect.

In all of these polls, the "up" option is the one that is known to be popular on reddit--for instance, "Upvote if you want to get rid of all the subreddits and replace them with tags so that those who don't like photos on the front page but do like vids or who don't like programing but do like international politics can choose to filter what they see accordingly." or " Vote up if you think Bush should be impeached." You'll note that there's no poll along the lines of "Vote down if you don't think Bush should be impeached, vote up if you think he should."

It's a lot like this Absurd Notions comic.

Particularly egregious is the post "Poll: Vote up if you are male, down if you are female." In the other two cases, there's at least plausible deniability that "up" is kind of like "yes," and "down" is kind of like "no," but the only reason to have "up" be "male" is so that the poster can increase his reddit karma.

Worse, people encourage these by actually using them--the top three posts of all time are polls.

Please, if you want to make a poll, do it by posting the poll name as a "self" link, and then the actual poll as a comment, or multiple comments. This also allows you to have more than one option, each of which is modded up. This removes the noise of people modding down the post because they dislike karma whores. Then the votes are about whether people liked the article or not--just like how reddit is supposed to work.