I've seen it suggested before to imply a bit of a margin of error in the numbers...

Ajedi32 · on April 7, 2017

Haha, I don't think the previous poster was referring to the error bars. That's not "XKCD-style", it's just standard practice in statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_bar

I think what he was referring to was the fact that the graphs appear to be hand drawn.

decode · on April 7, 2017

> I think what he was referring to was the fact that the graphs appear to be hand drawn.

Yes, and so was your parent comment. Some people have suggested that the hand-drawn appearance communicates imprecision. For example:

> The rough, seemingly hand drawn nature of the graph provides a visual hint as to the imprecision of the results.

https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/why_xkcd_style_graph...