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?
I had almost 40k comment karma and a couple hundred post karma on Reddit…
It never mattered to me.
My policy is this:
- Agree/Like/Interested = upvote
- Disagree/Not interested = no vote
- Stupid/Off-topic/Troll/Bait = downvote.
My policy is: Relevant to conversation = upvote.
Not Relevant or misinformation = downvote.
I upvote plenty of stuff that I disagree with because I think it will further engagement about an important topic.
I always upvote people I disagree with. Society is nothing without debate.
My way:
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Upvote: neutral / friendly contributions related to the topic, regardless of whether or not I personally agree (Exception; hate speech wrapped in nice words. I don’t care how “friendly” the sentence seems, if the message itself is hate speech of any kind then downvote and/or report)
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Nothing: Contributions that are friendly but off-topic, accidental duplicate posts, and stuff I don’t understand.
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Downvote: Spam, scams, troll posts and hate speech of any kind.
I never downvote people just because I disagree. On the contrary - different opinions but discussed in a civilized manner, that’s an upvote from me.
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This was how reddit was meant to be. Now every opinion the hive mind disagrees with gets downvoted to hell.
If I like something, I give an upvote. Haven’t thought about it so much.
I liked your comment so I clicked the “up” arrow.
Upvoted because I do the same.
I have added a bean to your current beans count
To me it’s supposed to be a system of recommendation. Quality comments or posts get upvoted so they can be recommended to other people (appearing higher up on a page, or in the Hot/Active section) and low quality (abusive, bad attitude, incorrect) comments or posts, the opposite. Sometimes upvoted are also a “thank you!”. Downvotes can be a general expression of disapproval but i try to do that sparingly… really only if someone is being jerky, or posted something so incorrect that someone could be misled in a meaningful way.
This
“Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. - - You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them. Or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus number of downvotes.
- Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
- Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published
- New: Shows most recent posts first
- Old: Shows oldest posts first
- Most Comments: Shows posts with highest number of comments first
- New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
- Top Day: Highest scoring posts during the last 24 hours
- Top Week: Highest scoring posts during the last 7 days
- Top Month: Highest scoring posts during the last 30 days
- Top Year: Highest scoring posts during the last 12 months
- Top All Time: Highest scoring posts during all time”
Hot sounds a lot like what Reddit uses. They use some secret algorithm where each upvote is like a balloon that lifts the post up and as the post ages, more and more weights are added to it over time so that it sinks down and gives more space for newer posts.
Reading the documentation can be a bit boring, but you can always use Bing to summarize the main points and even ask specific questions about the text.
When Reddit started out, if someone added something to a conversation, you upvoted it. If a comment was irrelevant, you downvoted it.
Then a bunch of fuckin kids arrived and thought the arrows meant like and dislike, and turned the place into an echo chamber
It shouldn’t happen here if the votes don’t do much
I’ve already seen plenty downvote for disagree here on lemmy.
