You can make real polls with a built-in voting system once you get to some karma threshold (I don't know what). Or you could make a general "Ask HN" type post and have people leave responses.

Your way (as I interpreted it) was to leave "yes" and "no" comments to be voted up, which would get you a karma boost for each vote. I don't think I've seen that before. I'd normally assume that was someone trying to cheat the system, both for making polls and gaining karma. But after checking your profile, seeing that you've been here a few years and obviously haven't been worried about karma, I just take it as a clever workaround without any bad intent.