Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.

As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?

And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?

  • UnanimousStargazer@feddit.nl
    2·
    1 year ago

    This is a good question, because it never gets a proper answer.

    I think most people consider it a way to approve or disapprove an OP or comment, but it’s completely unclear why.

    Let’s say you post an OP about basketballs in the community!basketballsarecool@someinstance. If your OP describes all the cool things about basketballs, you’ll receive upvotes. If your OP describes basketballs are useless, you’ll receive downvotes. And it probably will be the reverse in the community!basketballsareuseless@someinstance.

    Lemmy could at least stand out if the development community would remove downvotes. It’s an unnecessary polarizing passive aggressive way to disagree with somebody, that leads to all kinds if unnecessary negative emotions.

    But it would be even better if the whole upvote / downvote system can be disabled. You don’t know who is upvoting / downvoting and what does it say?