There are quite a few soft questions asking for book recommendations. Reading some of these threads one might notice that there are answers containing several books at once. As such this might not raise any suspicion but in some cases one cannot help but wonder whether the recommender has actually read all the books they recommend.
Recommending a book to someone that one has not read oneself without explicitly declaring so makes no sense to me. If I ask someone for a recommendation I (obviously) expect them to have read what they recommend to me.
Do I have to lower my expectations when interacting with the MSE community? Or are there community members that share my view?
Be that as it may, I have trusted sources from which I can get book recommendations so that I don't have to depend on MSE for that. But what is still of slight concern is that one can gain a lot of reputation just by posting lots of recommendations (to maths one knows nothing about). In the worst case, this could be very misleading to unexperienced users and generally to people with little mathematical experience and this would be the opposite of helpful. As a community I think we are striving to help people rather than the opposite so perhaps this is an issue one might want to address.