The reason is rather simple: there is a pretty well known and established convention inside GitHub threads to react to ideas, issues, and comments by indicating your support with a thumbs up or down.
If people who wish to show their support for something indicate this with a thumbs up reaction then:
- we need only look at one place without scrolling up or down to see how much support the idea/issue/comment has
- we reduce all the noise and pollution inside the thread so that we don't have to scroll past unhelpful "me too" comments which take up valuable screen space, especially if someone has actually posted something useful (like a workaround)
- we can more easily create, open source, and share automated tools for issue/thread/PR analysis which help maintainers figure out what the hottest topics are without writing tons of exceptions for whatever version of your "yup" is
If people who don't support something indicate this with a thumbs down reaction then:
- see all the reasons from above, negating the affirmations ("yup" becomes "nup", "me too" becomes "not me", etc)
- also, maybe write a comment explaining why you don't support the thing/idea/comment/PR, which could be useful
Sometimes, following a simple process or rule helps keep code clean, teams happy, and makes the world a better place.
...
Or do I really need to unleash a bot that finds and deletes noisy comments?
👍 (lol)